global supply chain

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pages: 414 words: 101,285

The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It by Ian Goldin, Mike Mariathasan

air freight, air traffic controllers' union, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, connected car, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, eurozone crisis, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, high-speed rail, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, John Snow's cholera map, Kenneth Rogoff, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, moral hazard, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, open economy, precautionary principle, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reshoring, risk free rate, Robert Solow, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social contagion, social distancing, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tail risk, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, vertical integration

We examine how political changes and technological innovation gave rise to global supply chains. An analysis of “best practices” in supply chain management shows how these supply networks are vulnerable to systemic risk. We then seek to identify ways to make supply networks more resilient. This chapter’s conclusion draws lessons for systemic thinking from supply chain management and considers how the resilience and robustness of the system may be improved. GLOBAL SUPPLY CHAINS We begin by considering the rise of global supply chains in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. We show how political and technological changes shaped global trade and international relations and how supply chain management adapted to suit this new transnational environment.

In a recent survey of international supply chain managers, McKinsey and Company found that product complexity and financial volatility were among the most important determinants of supply chain strategies.48 Their survey also documents that these professionals perceived supply chain risk as being greater in 2008 than in 2006. The risks that executives reported were linked to the difficulty of obtaining accurate information on the state of global supply chains, something that has become more difficult as globalization has made the world more complex. The executives emphasized that substantial resources are required for the management of global supply chains. These findings are consistent with the results from a separate, more extensive survey conducted among three hundred global manufacturing companies by the Massachusetts-based consultancy PRTM.49 The company’s research found that some managers today actually believe that outsourcing is an impediment to competitiveness under certain circumstances as a result of its negative impact on resilience, going against the core of lean management philosophy.

We have shown that connectivity in both the financial sector and the real economy has increased dramatically in the twenty-first century and that global governance has failed to match the speed of global integration. The resulting governance gap has led to systemic risk in the financial sector and to instability in the global supply chain network. Global supply chains and financial systems operate on the foundation of increasingly sophisticated infrastructure networks. Infrastructure includes the freight and travel networks touched on in chapter 3 but also the world’s energy grid and the information superhighway that has given us the World Wide Web.


pages: 497 words: 144,283

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

It is not countries as a whole that ascend value chains but such circuits of people who are attached to global nodes. Gradually, places such as garment production centers in Dhaka and Addis Ababa begin to feel almost detached from their own country even as they become key drivers of its growth; they belong as much to the global supply chain as to their nation. So synchronized are global supply chains that they serve as a seismograph of our amplified connectivity. Like earthquakes causing equally powerful aftershocks, the financial crisis of 2008 contracted world trade five times more severely than it did world GDP. First the credit crunch created a demand shock, meaning a huge slump in purchases of durable goods.

This trend is playing out around the world from East Africa to Southeast Asia as dynamic new regional federations take shape through common infrastructures and institutions. North America too is growing into a truly united supercontinent. Third, the nature of geopolitical competition is evolving from war over territory to war over connectivity. Competing over connectivity plays out as a tug-of-war over global supply chains, energy markets, industrial production, and the valuable flows of finance, technology, knowledge, and talent. Tug-of-war represents the shift from a war between systems (capitalism versus communism) to a war within one collective supply chain system. While military warfare is a regular threat, tug-of-war is a perpetual reality—to be won by economic master planning rather than military doctrine.

Supply chains are the complete ecosystem of producers, distributors, and vendors that transform raw materials (whether natural resources or ideas) into goods and services delivered to people anywhere.*7 Whether you are awake or asleep, scarcely a moment of our daily lives—sipping morning coffee, driving a car, talking on the phone, sending an email, eating a meal, or going to the movies—doesn’t involve global supply chains. And yet as universal as they are, supply chains are not things in themselves. They are a system of transactions. We do not see supply chains; rather, we see their participants and infrastructures—the things that connect supply to demand. What we can see, however, by tracing supply chains link by link is how these micro-interactions add up to large global shifts.


pages: 292 words: 87,720

Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green by Henry Sanderson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, circular economy, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Exxon Valdez, Fairphone, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Global Witness, income per capita, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, megacity, Menlo Park, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, popular capitalism, purchasing power parity, QR code, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, the new new thing, three-masted sailing ship, Tony Fadell, UNCLOS, WikiLeaks, work culture

The same year, a young man called Robin Zeng made his way to southern China, to the bustling coastal city of Dongguan in southern Guangdong province near Hong Kong, which was embracing capitalism and openness to the world, despite the widespread crackdown on political speech that followed the Tiananmen violence. For an ambitious young man in 1989 moving to Dongguan was like heading to the centre of the world, a place becoming connected to global supply chains where workers lived in crowded dormitories and could watch Hong Kong TV. In the city, which a few years earlier had been farmland and rice paddies, foreign investors were being encouraged by the local government to invest in manufacturing enterprises. Dongguan attracted significant Taiwanese, Hong Kong and other foreign investment in factories, and acted as a magnet for Chinese migrant workers (Dongguan’s population doubled in the 1980s).

While Tesla and Elon Musk got all the attention, the real growth was going to come from China, where the government had launched generous subsidies for EV purchasers. In 2015 China launched an ambitious plan to dominate future technologies, called ‘Made in China 2025’, which was a significant government-led effort to decouple China from global supply chains and support indigenous innovation. One of the key sectors was electric vehicles. That led to a rapid expansion in Chinese battery capacity. Over seventy percent of new battery cell capacity was being built in China.9 ‘It is not unusual to go to a battery factory and to be standing in the first of maybe one or two battery production lines but in the meantime, they have already installed sheds three through to eight and they are backfilling equipment and starting commissioning some of them,’ he said.10 Brinsden believed China would ‘surprise the world’ with the battery revolution.

‘We are poised to become a central actor in the creation of the new electrical world economy,’ Óscar Landerretche, the former chairman of Codelco, the world’s largest copper producer, owned by the Chilean state, told me in the company’s grand dark-panelled wooden offices in central Santiago. The Atacama is the beginning of a global supply chain that enables all our digital lives – from iPhones to iPads and laptops. It is a reminder that for all our ability to live on our smartphones and store our data in the cloud we have still not moved beyond digging up finite minerals from the earth to meet our needs. As Max Planck once observed: ‘Mining is not everything, but without mining everything is nothing.’1 In early 2016 I was picked up in the dusty mining town of Calama, where copper miners once spent the fortunes they made from feeding China’s insatiable demand for the metal in the mid-2000s.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Economist Dani Rodrik and others argue that hyperglobalization, democracy, and national sovereignty create an “inconsistent trilemma.” To maintain democracy and sovereignty, hyperglobalization needs to be curtailed. More recently, as the consequence of the COVID-19 crisis and the ensuing disruptions to global supply chains, logistics, and transportation networks, calls for reshoring or friend-shoring of manufacturing and global supply chains have become louder and more popular. Indeed, global pandemics that spread faster because of globalization have first led to draconian restrictions of the movement of people—as during the peak of COVID-19—when foreign travel became nearly impossible and is still hampered.

Mounting evidence began suggesting as much in 2021 to anyone following the financial news. Inflation, the precursor to stagflation, flared up thanks to the COVID-19 shock, which was both a negative supply and demand shock. The COVID-19 recession led to massive and unprecedented monetary and fiscal stimulus in 2020–21 that, together with global supply chain bottlenecks, commodity price surges, and a shrinkage in labor supply, nudged inflation rates to levels not seen since the 1980s. Things got worse in 2022, when some observers hoped that the fading of the COVID-19 contagion would reduce the supply bottlenecks that cause inflation. Instead, the Russian invasion of Ukraine raised the price of commodities that Russia and Ukraine supply: oil and natural gas, industrial metals, fertilizers and agricultural goods.

Instead, the Russian invasion of Ukraine raised the price of commodities that Russia and Ukraine supply: oil and natural gas, industrial metals, fertilizers and agricultural goods. Then the Omicron variant of COVID-19 struck China. A draconian Zero-COVID policy forced the shutdown of entire cities that are major hubs for business, trade and transportation. This further clogged global supply chains. When goods are scarce, prices rise. Inflation climbed in advanced economies and emerging markets. Severe droughts heightened concerns about access to food, a prescription for volatility. Poor crops in Russia and Ukraine and a drought in parts of the Middle East sparked food riots in 2010 that launched the Arab Spring.


pages: 354 words: 92,470

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 9: THE DARK SIDE OF TECHNOLOGY 1.Although it is worth noting that we may be close to reaching the physical limits of miniaturization: quantum mechanics suggests life could become a lot less certain. 2.The phrase ‘mass production’ wasn’t coined until the 1920s. It originally referred to the Ford Motor Company. 3.For a useful summary of the evolution of global supply chains, see R. Baldwin, Global Supply Chains: Why they emerged, why they matter, and where they are going, Centre for Trade and Economic Integration Working Paper CTEI-2012-13, Graduate Institute, Geneva, 2012. 4.Lord Reith, director general of the BBC between 1927 and 1938, was keen to deliver to his audience ‘All that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement … The preservation of a high moral tone is obviously of paramount importance.’ 5.Winston Churchill appeared to thrive on alcohol in ways that would likely be unacceptable today, yet he was rarely criticized.

Where David Ricardo’s comparative advantage applied, countries would have ended up specializing in some areas and exiting from others.10 In other words, there would have been both winners and losers in the US labour market, even if overall economic activity had ended up at a higher level (labour standards across the region would also have ended up higher, one reason why TPP’s demise comes at considerable cost).11 Where global supply chains were formed, specialist production would have been concentrated in some countries, and would have disappeared from others: again, there would have been labour market disruption even if the pie had increased in size. Meanwhile, countries integrated into Asian supply chains that had not signed up to TPP would have found themselves excluded from those supply chains in the future: for them, the playing field would not so much have been levelled, but rather tilted dramatically against them.

Yet without the information technology revolution, it is difficult to imagine that the world would have experienced anything like the degree of globalization witnessed since the 1980s. At a stroke, the nineteenth-century coordination problem – which led to a concentration of industrial activities in a limited number of areas – was removed. Global supply chains took over. Apple could design its iPhone in California, yet make it in China, courtesy of FoxConn. BMW could build its Minis in Oxford, yet have the engines made in Brazil. JP Morgan could package up US sub-prime mortgages, knowing that the bundles it had assembled could then be distributed to Norwegian pension funds.


pages: 272 words: 76,154

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

In recent years, corporate leadership has rightly prioritized addressing cyber risks, the threat of technological obsolescence, and the consequences of a jobless underclass as a result of increased automation. However, there are now mounting concerns that something more fundamental is at risk. Many observers have begun to wonder whether global supply chains—a critical factor in the success of many multinational corporations—will continue to function as they once had. Over the past fifty years, multinational corporations have built and relied on global supply chains to source goods from low-cost regions and sell them in other countries for higher prices. This drove the success of many companies—catalyzing their profits by lowering costs, helping to drive global GDP, and underpinning the economic success of many emerging economies such as China’s.

The prospect of seeing the profit gains of low-cost production all but wiped out is just another strand boardrooms must confront. Ultimately, companies are left with a choice between absorbing these higher costs or passing them on to the consumer. Yet another threat to global supply chains is the emerging “splinternet”—an increasingly fragmented internet with competing China-led and US-led platforms. This technological fragmentation has the potential to dramatically disrupt global supply chains by eliminating centralized procurement and thereby raising costs and reducing the efficiency gained from shared global services. Furthermore, a balkanized internet promises to increase the complexity of companies’ operations and erode their ability to respond quickly to market forces.

If today’s global economic and political system is upended, boards will have to rethink their business models or risk failure. The prevailing globalized economy has allowed corporations to tap relatively cheap capital, deploy it around the world, and garner higher returns (the carry trade), while hiring and recruiting the best talent internationally. Multilateralism has significantly lowered the costs of global supply chains, enabling companies to manufacture goods in low-cost environments and sell them at higher prices in developed markets—as Apple has done with its iPhones. This has driven trade and investment, and thus economic growth, at a global scale to levels not previously seen. But in a rapidly de-globalizing world, these benefits could quickly disappear.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Machines are becoming defter and software is becoming cleverer, and these improvements are increasing the set of human tasks that can be cheaply automated. At the same time, the digital revolution has supercharged a second force: globalization. It would have been nearly impossible for rich Western firms to manage the sprawling global supply chains that wrapped around the world over the last twenty years without powerful information technology. And while China and other emerging markets might have become better integrated in the world economy even without companies such as Apple scattering production across the globe, such growth would have been much slower and less dramatic.

Electrification upended all sorts of industrial processes, and also gave us electric light, telephone calls and rock music. The digital revolution is no exception to this pattern. The web causes hardship for publishers precisely because it is so good for news consumers, who now enjoy access to massive amounts of information at very low cost. The global supply chains enabled by information technology have been hard on some workers but very good for shoppers as a whole, who now enjoy cheaper electronics, clothing and toys as a result. One marvels at the pure, massive consumer surplus generated by something like Wikipedia. When I was a kid, there were still people who would knock on your door to try to sell you encyclopedias, and school essays often needed to be written in a library, where you could easily turn to the Britannica on the shelves or dig through the card catalogue, looking for just the right source.

But property rights have been secure enough to satisfy lots of multinational firms, who have been willing to contract with Chinese companies or invest directly in the Chinese economy. Yet the role of foreign capital points to a second force at work in China’s rise, without which Chinese liberalization would have generated far more meagre returns. Over the last generation, technological change enabled explosive growth in global supply chains. Supply-chain trade has had far-reaching consequences for global development. Success in export markets once required economies to develop an entire suite of capabilities. To export electronics or cars, South Korea and Japan needed to build an entire, high-quality supply chain domestically: they needed lots of firms capable of designing and manufacturing components, and well-organized corporations capable of planning and coordinating the design, production and sale of complex goods.


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

From the beginning of his tenure, Lenny pursued a “value-enhancing strategy” focused on shifting production and related activities away from the company via outsourcing.51 Indicative of this effort, Hershey outsourced elements of production of its chocolate liquor—the chocolate core of products like Kisses—to other companies, leaving only final reassembly steps to its own facilities and workforce. As a further extension of that strategy, the company announced its “global supply chain transformation” in February 2007. The official objective of the three-year program could not be a clearer statement of fissuring as applied to supply chain strategy. “The transformation program will result in a flexible, global supply chain capable of delivering Hershey’s iconic brands, in a wide range of affordable items and assortments across retail channels in the company’s priority markets.”52 The plan entailed further reducing the number of Hershey’s own production lines, “outsourcing production of low value-added items” to other companies, and building a new production facility in Monterrey, Mexico.

This included a more aggressive stance toward the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco, and Grainmillers Union, which represents Hershey’s workers. In 2002 the breakdown in negotiations over wages and benefits led to a forty-four-day strike. Although the parties settled the strike, the longer-term effort to reduce jobs continued. 52. See “Hershey Announces Global Supply Chain Transformation,” PR Newswire, February 15, 2007 (http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hershey-announces-global-supply-chain-transformation-57933727.html, accessed July 21, 2012). 53. In addition to corporate documents and contemporaneous accounts, this section is based on Cleeland (2009). 54. Weekly stock price increases outpaced the Dow Jones Industrial Average consistently from 2002 through the first half of 2007.

Compliance, Commitment and the Improvement of Labor Conditions in Global Supply Chains.” Politics and Society 27, no. 2: 319–351. Locke, Richard, Greg Distelhorst, Timea Pal, and Hiram Samel. 2012. “Production Goes Global, Standards Stay Local: Private Labor Regulation in the Global Electronics Industry.” MIT Political Science Department Research Paper No. 2012–1. Locke, Richard, Fei Qin, and Alberto Brause. 2007. “Does Monitoring Improve Labor Standards? Lessons from Nike.” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 61, no. 1: 3–31. Locke, Richard, and Monica Romis. 2007. “Improving Work Conditions in a Global Supply Chain.” Sloan Management Review 48, no. 2: 54–62.


pages: 385 words: 112,842

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

The robots could still be coming,” Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-deal-port-dockworkers-automation-ilwu-union-permit-245-maersk-robot-jobs-20190628-story.html. some portion of the workers within an industry: Cole, “The Tip of the Spear.” choke points in the global supply chain: Jake Alimahomed-Wilson and Immanuel Ness, eds., Choke Points: Logistics Workers Disrupting the Global Supply Chain (London: Pluto Press, 2018). full pensions: Andrea Bernstein, “Why 80K People Applied for 2,400 Positions at LA’s Ports,” KPCC, June 5, 2017, https://www.scpr.org/news/2017/06/05/72573/why-80k-people-applied-for-2-400-positions-at-la-s.

The shocks to the supply chain that were to come would only accelerate this dispersion of manufacturing capacity across the globe, wresting from mainland China its monopoly on the creation of countless objects. This is not to say that the world’s multinationals, and Vietnam itself, were ready. In the immediate aftermath of the black dawn of the coronavirus, manufacturers tested the hypothesis that factories outside China could protect them from shocks to global supply chains, and in many cases found it wanting. What so many companies couldn’t get around, no matter where their factories were located, was that the parts and materials that are fed into today’s factories still so often come from China. Manufacturing in the twenty-first century isn’t material in, finished products out, as it was in the days of Bethlehem Steel and Henry Ford.

These workers, many of whom have specialized skills and knowledge even if their work is technically blue-collar, have the ability to shut down that much more economic activity should they choose to walk off the job. At ports, this is especially true, since they are, as has been amply demonstrated through the power of striking transportation workers all over the world, choke points in the global supply chain. Thus, for workers whose skills are especially in demand, think of coders in Silicon Valley, or sufficiently well organized, like unionized dockworkers, automation can make them more powerful, not less. The more than 7,000 full ILWU members who work at the Port of Los Angeles have translated that power into salaries in excess of $100,000 a year, free health insurance, and full pensions.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Then there was a revolution, thanks to the emergence of international supply chains. Foreign investors and global companies now consider suppliers in a poor country an integral part of their own business and it is in their own commercial interest to invest massively in their productivity. This is one reason why many countries that have been integrated into global supply chains – not least through much-maligned low-wage factories and ‘sweatshops’ – have been able to skip several stages of development and grow at a record pace. Once you have built factories, roads and ports to manufacture and transport clothes and toys, you can then also use them to produce and export high-tech components.33 Surprisingly, this spread of technology has gone hand in hand with stronger local protection for intellectual property.

When the crisis comes You might think yes, yes, all that sounds nice, as long as everything goes smoothly, but then there are pandemics, natural disasters or wars and then we need the government. In desperate times, politicians need exceptional powers to get us to behave properly and produce what is needed. A common interpretation is that the pandemic showed that we can’t rely on global supply chains where tens of thousands of people across the globe manufacture our face masks, protective equipment and medical technology. Like China, many countries now think they should have had large domestic production, or at least have large stockpiles full of protective equipment like Finland did. We must ‘limit our dependence on other countries,’ said EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides.

New trade barriers were created, a large part of the workforce stayed at home while others were forbidden to cross national borders, and deliveries to the restaurant industry collapsed at the same time as demand for other food supplies soared when shoppers became preppers. The incredible thing about your shop shelves was that almost nothing happened. Through round-the-clock work to change suppliers, reallocate labour, adjust production methods and redirect transportation, the food industry managed to rebuild global supply chains in just a few weeks. It is an absolutely amazing achievement and we consumers noticed almost none of it. It was not done by any food tsar who dictated what everyone should do. It worked because it was not a centralized process. Each adjustment of the processes was based on local knowledge of what could be done in a particular place with the available raw materials and the workforce present – and what they could stop doing without creating catastrophic shortages elsewhere.


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

Bales of raw cotton came in by sea from far-off lands and were transformed by miraculous machines—combing, tight weaving, and precision dyeing—into thread, cloth, and finally clothes. Then those goods were sent off through the same channels to markets around the world. It was a glimpse of the future: global supply chains, competitive advantage, and automation made a once-unremarkable city the center of the global textile trade. Impressive as the new manufacturing machines were, the supply networks that fed them were equally important. Bigger, more efficient factories needed more and cheaper raw materials—not just cotton from Egypt and the Americas, but dyes and silk from Asia and eventually mineral resources such as iron ore and coal.

Manufacturing has now become just another “cloud service” that you can access from Web browsers, using a tiny amount of vast industrial infrastructure as and when you need it. Somebody else runs these factories; we just access them when we need them, much as we can access the huge server farms of Google or Apple to store our photos or process our e-mail. The academic way to put this is that global supply chains have become “scale-free,” able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Samsung. The non-academic way to say it is this: nothing is stopping you from making anything. The people now control the means of production. Or, as The Lean Startup author Eric Reis puts it, Marx got it wrong: “It’s not about ownership of the means of production, anymore.

People should do only what they do best, he said, and trade with others who make other specialized goods. No one person or town should try to do it all, since a society can do far more collectively with an efficient division of labor—comparative advantage plus trade equals growth. What was good in the eighteenth century is even better in the twenty-first, now that specialists have access to global supply chains for their commodity input materials and global consumer markets for their niche output products. Nearly thirty years ago, two MIT professors, Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, predicted this transition in a book titled The Second Industrial Divide. They argued that the mass-production model that defined twentieth-century manufacturing economies (the “first industrial divide” between people and production) was neither inevitable nor the end of innovation in making things.


pages: 555 words: 80,635

Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital by Kimberly Clausing

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, climate change refugee, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Donald Trump, fake news, floating exchange rates, full employment, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, index fund, investor state dispute settlement, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, offshore financial centre, open economy, Paul Samuelson, precautionary principle, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transfer pricing, uber lyft, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, zero-sum game

Membership expanded from 18 members at inception, to 84 members in 1980, to 164 members today (fig. 2.10).20 Also helping to fuel increasing trade have been falling communication and transportation costs. The greater access to information afforded by computerization and the Internet makes it far easier to do business across borders. Technological changes have also enabled global production processes, by solving the complicated logistical puzzles of global supply chains. Finally, economic growth abroad has also increased international trade flows, which tend to increase with the size of the economy. For the United States and more broadly the world, the importance of trade in the overall economy has grown by about 50 percent relative to its level in 1980.

US auto producers would similarly face higher prices for imported auto parts. Apple, Intel, and other globally integrated corporations would also see increased costs due to trade frictions. Further, a US decision to cut imports would negatively affect our nation’s own production, given that many products manufactured abroad draw on global supply chains in which US producers participate as suppliers. For example, in the goods we import from Mexico, a very large share of the value is made up of US content.6 For that matter, it turns out that the US firms who are the biggest exporters are also often the biggest importers. It is difficult to reduce imports without creating collateral damage.7 Figure 3.2: Imports Help the Boeing 787 Fly Reprinted with permission from Reuters Graphics, Thomson Reuters Markets LLC.

Again, it is difficult to truly disentangle these two sources of labor market disruption, especially as international trade and technological change fuel each other. Globalization allows quicker technological diffusion, and competitive forces encourage labor-saving innovation. Technological change enables globalization by lowering communication costs and creating solutions to the logistical puzzles of global supply chains. Figure 4.5: Almost Everywhere, the Manufacturing Share of Employment is Falling Data sources: International Labor Comparisons, US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monopoly and Excess Profits in the Global Economy As Chapter 2 showed, excess profits also play an important role in this story of workers’ woes.


pages: 266 words: 80,273

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

Let me emphasize that this was a total coincidence: this was a “what if” scenario playing out in a computer model of US society, featuring a made-up virus. They chose a coronavirus for the simulation partly to show how disruptive even a relatively mild virus can be. They succeeded. The result of the simulation was what we are living out now: overwhelmed health care, disrupted global supply chains, needless death, economic dislocation. And a table full of officials from government and industry sitting there saying, If this were to happen, there’s not much my sector/department/office could do. And the people who wrote that simulation were going easy on the officials—maybe so they’d sit through the entire afternoon and not be so horrified they’d quietly slip out at the coffee break, trying to forget what they’d seen.

But as the villages become more tightly coupled, both may suffer when one is attacked. A loose network absorbs shock; a tightly coupled one transmits it. That is happening in the Covid-19 pandemic. Countries go into lockdown; people stop shopping, traveling, and producing; and the effects ricochet through a tightly coupled global economy. The global supply chains of money, materials, people, energy, and component parts that underpin industries falter and break. Airlines go under as they are not set up to weather even a temporary disappearance of travelers. Malaria worsens in Africa as insecticide and antimalarial bed net deliveries falter. Microcredit that underpins small businesses throughout the developing world defaults because payment collectors are locked down, causing ramifications throughout an economy.

In the future, if deliveries depend more on automated systems, trucking may not remain as vulnerable—but the principle remains that if certain hub industries are paralyzed by loss of people, the impact can be far-reaching. There will be other choke points that depend on people: doctors and nurses, engineers who run power grids or essential manufacturing, or global supply chain managers are not all readily replaced. Even transient absences of key workers can cause snowballing problems. During Covid-19 lockdowns, oil refineries are shutting due to plummeting demand as air and road traffic fall. In a pandemic with a high loss of people, absence of workers at oil refineries starts becoming a problem.


pages: 477 words: 135,607

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson

air freight, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, flag carrier, full employment, global supply chain, intermodal, Isaac Newton, job automation, Jones Act, knowledge economy, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, oil shock, Panamax, Port of Oakland, post-Panamax, Productivity paradox, refrigerator car, Robert Solow, South China Sea, trade route, vertical integration, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

If Peru were as effective at port management as Australia, the World Bank estimated, that alone would increase its foreign trade by one-quarter. If it cannot be, it will receive the maritime equivalent of branchline service on a single-track railway. The big containerships that link national economies in the global supply chain, carrying nothing but stacks of metal boxes, will pass it by.16 Global supply chains were not in anyone’s mind in the spring of 1956. Over the next half century, freight transportation developed in ways that could not have been imagined by the dignitaries watching the Ideal-X take on those first containers at Port Newark. Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the remarkable history of the box is that time and again, even the most knowledgeable experts misjudged the course of events.

Workers in China produced her statuesque figure, using molds from the United States and other machines from Japan and Europe. Her nylon hair was Japanese, the plastic in her body from Taiwan, the pigments American, the cotton clothing from China. Barbie, simple girl though she is, had developed her very own global supply chain.1 Supply chains like Barbie’s are a direct result of the changes wrought by the rise of container shipping. They were unheard-of back in 1956, when Malcom McLean placed his first containers on board the Ideal-X, and in 1976, when high oil prices brought sky-high freight costs that stifled the flow of world trade.

With modern communications and container shipping, the retailer could design its own shirts and transmit the designs to a factory in Thailand, which used local labor to combine Chinese fabric made from American cotton, Malaysian buttons made from Taiwanese plastics, Japanese zippers, and decorations embroidered in Indonesia. The finished order, loaded into a 40-foot container, would be delivered in less than a month to a distribution center in Tennessee or a hyper marché in France. Global supply chains became so routine that in September 2001, when U.S. customs authorities stepped up border inspections following the terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, auto plants in Michigan began shutting down within three days for lack of imported parts. The improvement in logistics shows up statistically in reduced inventory levels.


pages: 128 words: 38,187

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

Global and grassroots environmental groups focused their energies on getting states, networks of states, and intergovernmental bodies like the United Nations to implement restrictions to stop companies from dumping toxic waste in streams and rivers, clear-cutting forests, and belching exhaust into the atmosphere. Over the past decade and a half, this state-centered focus has shifted to a consumer-centered focus as fears stoked by globalization have changed the frame of environmentalism. In the age of global supply chains, free trade agreements, and capital flight, states have increasingly come to be seen as incapable of protecting their citizens from big global problems like ozone depletion, climate change, and biodiversity loss, and even more tractable problems, like controlling hazardous waste flows or regulating toxic substances in consumer goods.14 But while processes of globalization have delegitimized states and made citizens feel disconnected from the protective embrace of their respective governments, they have also helped to forge new, global identities based on feelings of “world-citizenship.”15 Westerners in particular have become uneasily aware of their power as consumers in shaping and driving global value chains.

States, aside from the big players, appear weaker than ever (with less autonomy, power, authority), and their ability to tell corporations what to do is limited by their need for economic development and their membership in international bodies like the World Trade Organization that explicitly prohibit most environmental restrictions. On the flip side, transnational corporations are stronger than ever. One giant company, like Unilever or Walmart, affects millions of people around the world every day through its global supply chains. Free markets don’t exist, but maybe corporations are still the best, most sensible, way to heal the planet. They have reach, influence, and an unrivaled ability to coordinate action quickly. In Mackey’s story an enlightened corporation with a positive mission that honors all its stakeholders can heal the planet.

The probusiness environmental message of the 1987 Brundtland Report, in combination with the weakened power of states to control the actions of corporations, have pushed big environmental NGOs to change their stance toward corporations over the past decade and to focus on the marketplace as the most viable lever of change.32 As Gerald Butts, CEO of World Wildlife Fund Canada, explains about WWF’s decision to partner with Coca-Cola: We could spend fifty years lobbying seventy-five national governments to change the regulatory framework for the way these commodities are grown and produced. Or these folks at Coke could make a decision that they’re not going to purchase anything that isn’t grown or produced in a certain way—and the whole global supply chain changes overnight.33 Big environmental groups may criticize neoliberalism and transnational corporations, but these days their strategic agendas look very similar to those of companies like Whole Foods and Walmart. The state is viewed as a suspect, ineffective force, while the firm becomes the key vehicle for change.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

By the nineteenth century, England, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Italy, France, and Germany had established major colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, built upon what English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace termed “the unblushing selfishness of the greatest civilized nations.”1 The objective was to strengthen economic and political power by controlling key resources and strategic trading routes, and to deny these advantages to sovereign rivals. Over time, the colonies came to resemble modern global supply chains. In a thoroughly contemporary twist, Britain even outsourced the management of its colonies to private interests, the British East India Company. Colonialism provided access to low-cost raw materials, fueling the growth and prosperity of the Old World. It provided cheap labor, often in the form of slaves, and new markets for the products of the colonial powers.

The Y2K software problems fueled the development of India's software industry. The new economy was centered on China, now the world's factory, exporting around 50 percent of its output. It imported resources and parts that were then assembled or processed and shipped out again. Smaller emerging economies, especially in Asia, became integrated into new Sino-centric global supply chains. Consultant David Rothkopf highlighted the uneven balance of power within emerging markets: “Without China, the BRICs are just the BRI, a bland, soft cheese that is primarily known for the whine [sic] that goes with it…”8 China was now the largest purchaser of iron ore and other metals, and one of the biggest purchasers of cotton and soybeans.

They were the result of greater risk-taking, underwritten by the government, in institutions that were seen as too big or too important to fail. In effect, they were the beneficiaries of large, hidden transfers from other parts of society. Increased international trade, improvements in transport and information technology, and the development of global supply chains further altered the structure of labor markets, increasing inequality. Businesses in developed economies lowered costs by outsourcing labor-intensive production to low-cost locations, retaining the more profitable operations requiring higher skills. This allowed the firms to increase their earnings at the expense of workers.


pages: 233 words: 67,596

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris

always be closing, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, commoditize, data acquisition, digital map, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, if you build it, they will come, intangible asset, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knapsack problem, late fees, linear programming, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Netflix Prize, new economy, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, RFID, search inside the book, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply-chain management, text mining, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, traveling salesman, yield management

At a polymer chemicals company, many of the company’s products had become commoditized. Executives believed that it was important to optimize the global supply chain to squeeze maximum value and cost out of it. The complexity of the unit’s supply chain had significantly increased over the previous couple of years. Responding to the increased complexity, the organization created a global supply chain organization, members of which were responsible for the movement of products and supplies around the world. In the new organization, someone was responsible for the global supply chain, there were planning groups in the regions, and then planners in the different sites.

Amazon.com’s business model, in contrast, requires the company to manage a constant flow of new products, suppliers, customers, and promotions, as well as deliver orders directly to its customers by promised dates. With one of the most complex supply chain problems in business, Amazon.com recruited Gang Yu, a professor of management science and a software entrepreneur who is one of the world’s leading authorities on optimization analytics, as the head of its global supply chain. Yu and his team began by integrating all the elements of their supply chain in order to coordinate supplier sourcing decisions. To determine the optimal sourcing strategy (determining the right mix of joint replenishment, coordinated replenishment, and single sourcing) as well as manage all the logistics to get a product from manufacturer to customer, Amazon.com applies advanced optimization and supply chain management methodologies and techniques across its fulfillment, capacity expansion, inventory management, procurement, and logistics functions.


pages: 400 words: 88,647

Frugal Innovation: How to Do Better With Less by Jaideep Prabhu Navi Radjou

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Computer Numeric Control, connected car, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, financial exclusion, financial innovation, gamification, global supply chain, IKEA effect, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, low cost airline, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, megacity, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planned obsolescence, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, reshoring, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, software as a service, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, value engineering, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture , X Prize, yield management, Zipcar

Adapt R&D R&D engineers also need to take full advantage of digitised and flexible supply chain assets and processes when designing products. Three conditions should be in place: Products must be factory-agnostic; in other words, it should be possible to produce them in any factory in the manufacturer’s global supply chain. For instance, John Deere, a US agricultural and construction machinery manufacturer, has an operating model, Design Anywhere Build Anywhere (DABA), which allows it to shift production quickly and seamlessly from one factory to another, depending on relative capacity. R&D should use fewer, more standard components so they can be assembled faster on the shop floor.

La Ruche’s nationwide network of over 500 “hives” brings together a critical mass of local customers, giving them direct access to locally produced fresh, seasonal and ecofriendly foods. By cutting out the middleman, La Ruche’s network connects 50,000 members directly to over 2,500 small farmers. Large corporations and big-box retailers run global supply chains that deliver economies of scale that are increasingly unsustainable (such as selling bananas all year around). Collective buying platforms, by contrast, focus on large-scale localisation by supporting small-circuit supply chains that reduce time and distance between production and consumption, and are thus more sustainable environmentally, financially and socio-economically.

., Caterpillar to Expand Manufacturing and Increase Employment in the United States with New Hydraulic Excavator Facility in Victoria, Texas, Caterpillar press release, August 12th 2010. 7Wong, H., Potter, A. and Naim, M., “Evaluation of postponement in the soluble coffee supply chain: A case study”, International Journal of Production Economics, Vol. 131, Issue 1, May 2011, pp. 355–64. 8O’Marah, K., chief content officer, SCM World, and senior research fellow at Stanford Global Supply Chain Management Forum, interview with Navi Radjou, March 11th 2014. 9Beasty, C., “The Chain Gang”, Destination CRM, October 2007. 10Morieux, Y., “As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify”, TED Talk, October 2013. 11Lopez, M., CEO, Lopez Research, interview with Navi Radjou, March 28th 2014. 12O’Connell, A., “Lego CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp on leading through survival and growth”, Harvard Business Review, January 2009. 13“The Return to Apple”, All About Steve Jobs: http://allaboutstevejobs.com/bio/longbio/longbio_08.php. 14O’Connell, op. cit. 15Francis, S., CEO, Flock Associates, and former head of Aegis Europe, interview with Jaideep Prabhu, January 27th 2014. 16This case study is adapted from an original version that appeared in French in L’Innovation Jugaad, published by Diateino in 2013.


pages: 307 words: 92,165

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, additive manufacturing, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Free Software Foundation, game design, global supply chain, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lifelogging, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off grid, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, TED Talk, the long tail, the market place

The process of moving materials and parts around the world generates large amounts of pollution. Wal-Mart estimates that about 80 percent of its corporate carbon footprint is generated by its vast and global network of suppliers. Global supply chains move raw materials to the factory, then to the assembly line, and finally, to the last stop, the consumer. All of us rely on the flow of global supply chains. Nearly every mass produced object we live with, purchase, consume and throw away—from the most humble plastic toy to the medical device that saves lives in surgery—is the product of a long and winding supply chain.

Fortunately, the student seemed satisfied with my answer, but his question made me wonder what his generation will witness in their lifetimes. Today 3D printing is already becoming a mainstream tool in industries such as aerospace engineering where product lines involve small batches of complex parts. In the future 3D printing will disrupt the economy in more profound ways. Global supply chains will be replaced by agile and independent small manufacturers able to respond quickly to fluctuating inventories and market demands. Less directly, perhaps the biggest contribution of 3D printing technologies to the economy will be to reduce the risk and friction associated with trying out new business models.

Some metal manufacturing methods leave 90 percent of the raw metal behind in waste byproduct. For example, it can take up to 15 kilograms of raw metal to make a 1 kilogram airplane part.4 Since their goal was to study the carbon footprint generated over an entire product lifecycle, researchers studied the downstream impact of 3D printing on the global supply chain. Manufacturing could be greened if companies used digital inventory and local, just-in-time production—a de-centralized manufacturing model that 3D printing is ideally suited for. The Atkins Study concluded that “The application of AM for suitable parts and components, especially those that are of low volume but high value, can result in a significant reduction in stock costs and inventory levels.”


pages: 302 words: 96,609

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Big Tech, California gold rush, Cape to Cairo, clean water, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, energy transition, global supply chain, Google Earth, Livingstone, I presume, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, private military company, Scramble for Africa, social distancing, tech baron, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

By the time one traces the chain from the child slogging in the cobalt mine to the rechargeable gadgets and cars sold to consumers around the world, the links have been misdirected beyond recognition, like a con man running a shell game. This system of obfuscating the severity of exploitation of poor people of color at the bottom of global supply chains goes back centuries. Few people sitting for breakfast in England in the 1700s knew that their tea was sweetened by sugar harvested under brutal conditions by African slaves toiling in the West Indies. The slaves remained far removed from the British breakfast table until a band of abolitionists placed the true picture of slavery directly in front of the English people.

Consider the first sentence, because this is the important one. If the OECD and its constituents concede that 70 percent of 72 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt “has some touch” with child labor, that would imply that half of the cobalt in the world was touched by child labor in the Congo. This fact alone indicted a preponderance of the global supply chain of cobalt, yet child labor was far from the only problem in the Congo’s artisanal mining sector. How much of the Congo’s cobalt was “touched” by the hundreds of thousands of Congolese people suffering the consequences of toxic exposure to cobalt, uranium, lead, nickel, mercury, and other heavy metals?

They all played their roles, but they were also symptoms of a more malevolent disease: the global economy run amok in Africa. The depravity and indifference unleashed on the children working at Tilwezembe is a direct consequence of a global economic order that preys on the poverty, vulnerability, and devalued humanity of the people who toil at the bottom of global supply chains. Declarations by multinational corporations that the rights and dignity of every worker in their supply chains are protected and preserved seem more disingenuous than ever. The translator for my interviews, Augustin, was distraught after several days of trying to find the words in English that captured the grief being described in Swahili.


pages: 239 words: 62,311

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa by Irene Yuan Sun

"World Economic Forum" Davos, asset light, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business logic, capital controls, clean water, Computer Numeric Control, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, job automation, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, means of production, mobile money, Multi Fibre Arrangement, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tacit knowledge, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population

Landlocked and completely surrounded by its much larger neighbor, South Africa, it has few natural resources and a population of only 2 million. With these scare resources, it has to contend with the third-highest rate of HIV infection in the world.9 But even here, Chinese factories have found a niche due to Lesotho’s favorable position under US trade policy. As a result, Lesotho has become a link in the global supply chain that churns out the yoga pants and T-shirts ubiquitous in the United States. A world apart from both Nigeria and Lesotho, Kenya is the flagship economy of East Africa, boasting its own brand of entrepreneurship and innovation. Although youth unemployment has been worrisome and security concerns about neighboring Somalia lurk, Kenya’s GDP has grown consistently at a robust 5–6 percent a year over the past five years, and its burgeoning tech sector has earned Nairobi the moniker “Silicon Savannah.”

That year alone, 14,000 out of 50,000 garment workers lost their jobs as factory after factory shuttered its doors.2 If such an event were to repeat itself today, Mrs. Shen would have little room to maneuver—her factory’s small size and the lack of pricing power that clothing contractors command mean that she would be unable to raise prices in order to maintain margins. Indeed, the clothing industry is now dominated by a global supply chain within which Mrs. Shen’s factory is but one small link. Designs are made by retailers in the United States, Europe, and other developed countries. These are the brand names we’ve all heard of—Levi’s, Kohl’s, Reebok, Walmart. Those retailers go to a few giant sourcing firms (one expert I spoke to called them Big Sourcing), located mainly in Hong Kong and Taiwan, to get an agreement to have their designs made by a specified date and at a specified price.

See also labor-intensive production cardboard box factory, 89–91 cash flow, 118 celadon, 21 Central Bank of Kenya, 144, 145 Central Bank of Lesotho, 68 Chang, Leslie, 100 Chaplin, Charlie, 100–101 Chen, Jennifer, 62–63, 115–116, 126 China African exports to, 109–110 African factories of, 5–8 economic development in, 18–19, 21, 161–163 economic slowing in and African industrialization, 171–172 Four Great Families in Nigeria from, 34–35 GDP in, 2–3, 29–30 governance and governance development in, 129–134, 147 government aid to Africa, 179n7 Great Leap Forward, 28 immigration to Africa from, 32, 167–169, 181n1 industrialization of, 1–3 investment in Africa, 42–44 labor costs in, 92 match between Africa and, 167–168 migrants from, 123–127 negative effects of factories in, 8 outward turning by, 173–177 pharmaceutical industry, 161–163 plastic wrap in, 28–29 poverty in, 180n10 size of economy in, 179n2 textiles smuggled from, 40–41 China Road and Bridge Corporation, 175–177 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 129 clothing manufacturing automation in, 172 competition among, 71–72 failure rates in, 114–115 global supply chain and, 55–57 infrastructure and, 62–63 labor requirements of, 54–57 in Lesotho, 7, 49–50, 53–54, 67–69, 71–72 local ownership of factories in, 113–119, 188n5 partnerships in, 114–117 textiles vs., 52 unions in, 102–105 See also textile manufacturing Coca-Cola, 138 colonialism, 129 commitment, personal, 32–33, 45–47, 70–71, 85, 167–169 commodity prices, 65 competitor sets, 52–53 corruption, 7–8, 74, 130 in manufacturing, 74–81 in Nigeria, 39, 40–41, 63, 75–78, 136–140 Corruption Perceptions Index, 77 Côte d’Ivoire, 120 cultural differences, 97–98 customers, 52–54, 65 Dangote, Aliko, 10 demand, changes in, 65 demographics, 92–94, 181n11, 190n14 Deng Xiaoping, 29–30, 175 Department for International Development, UK, 82, 154 diversity, 51–54 Doctors Without Borders, 158–159 donor fatigue, 158–159 Dutch disease, 36 East Asian miracle, 29 Ebola virus, 158 economic development, 106–107 bootstrapping, 132–136, 147–148, 165–166 China, 18–19, 28, 29–30 East Asia, 29 education and, 4–5 endowment theory of, 9–10, 135–136 flying geese theory and, 27–29 future of, 174–177 industrialization and, 12–13, 20 leapfrogging, 22 overconfidence for, 165–166 Washington Consensus on, 20–22 education, 4–5, 30, 95–96 worker skills training, 129–134, 148–150 Edwards, Lawrence, 57 efficiency, 46–47, 71–72, 118 employment, 43–44, 89–107 benefits of manufacturing, 94–96 cultural differences and, 96–98 difficulty of factory, 91, 100–101 fluctuations in, 57, 64 full, 91, 93 informal sector, 94 labor- vs. capital-intensive production and, 51, 52 learning manufacturing through, 17–19, 23–26, 89–91 of locals vs. expatriates, 57, 92–93, 184n5 stability in, 60–61, 64 of youth, 130 enabling context, 135 endowment theory of development, 9–10, 135–136 environmental issues, 7–8, 70, 74, 75, 81, 175–177 ethics issues, 159–160 Ethiopia, 11, 73 factory ownership in, 113 local ownership in, 120–123 pharmaceutical industry, 121–123, 156–157, 163–169 Eubank, Nicholas, 140–141 European Union, 53–54 exchange rates, 36–37, 54, 56, 65 FAW, 2, 5–6, 12 flexibility, 146–148 flip-flops, 46–47, 63 flying geese theory, 9, 23–30, 93, 112–113 Fokuo, Isaac, 129–132 Ford Foundation, 82 foreign investment, 33–34, 42–44, 73–74 Formosa denim mill, 57–61, 64, 184n6 Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, 137 Four Asian Tigers, 29 Frederick, Kenneth, 79–81 French, Howard, 97 Gap, Inc., 117 Gates Foundation, 154 GDP from African manufacturing, 41 China, 2–3, 29–30 Ghana, 41 Lesotho, 62, 184n13 manufacturing and increased, 26–27 Nigeria, 36, 62 gel capsules, 121–123 Germany, pharmaceutical industry in, 156, 192n12 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 99 Ghana, 41 GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), 166, 167, 194n37 global competition, 37–39, 40–41, 70, 71–74 Global Corruption Barometer, 137 Global Fund, 154, 159 Goodall, Jane, 129 governance, 22, 82 bootstrapping development and, 132–136 good enough, 129–150 improving through using, 136–142 innovation and, 142–148 Nigerian customs agency and, 136–140 prevailing views on, 134–136 government development of with industrialization, 82–84 enforcement capacity and, 79–81 export-oriented manufacturing and, 63–64 loans, 65 Nigerian textile manufacturing and, 35, 37–39, 53 pharmaceutical industry and, 164–165 regulatory systems, 70, 74–75 in shaping manufacturing sectors, 65–66 Washington Consensus on, 20 Gu, Barry, 67–69, 84–85 Han, Jason, 138–140 hardships, willingness to endure, 167–168.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

But once again he produced compelling reporting and vivid phrases (though the trope about the flattening of the world became a little tiresome). He was one of the first Western journalists to write extensively about companies such as Infosys (he came up with the book’s title during a brainstorming session with one of the company’s founders, Nandan Nilekani). He grasped the importance of global supply chains as well as global communications—and produced fascinating accounts of the internal operations of companies such as Walmart and UPS to illustrate his point. And once again Friedman acted like an enthusiastic tour guide to the future, introducing us to the companies that are inventing the future and giving us a few minutes of face time with the new masters of the universe.

In The Next American Frontier (1983) he blamed America’s economic woes on its “paper entrepreneurialism”—its preference for financial gamesmanship over making and improving things—and called for more protectionism. But then he produced a series of articles and books that challenged the left to rethink some of its basic assumptions. In “Who Are We?” he demolished the case for protectionism in a world of global supply chains. What does it mean to protect the “American” car industry when the components of the average car are made all around the world? In The Work of Nations (1991) he argued that a country’s competitiveness depends on its human capital—on the education and skills of its population—rather than on the profitability of the companies that happen to have their headquarters within its borders.

Muscular emerging-market champions such as India’s ArcelorMittal in steel and Mexico’s Bimbo in baked goods are gobbling up Western companies. Brainy ones such as Infosys and Wipro are taking over office work. And consumers in developing countries are getting richer faster than their equivalents in the West. In some cases the traditional global supply chain is being reversed: Embraer buys many of its component parts from the West and does the high-value-added work in Brazil. Old assumptions about innovation are also being challenged. People in the West like to believe that their companies cook up new ideas in their laboratories at home and then export them to the developing world, which makes it easier to accept job losses in manufacturing.


pages: 363 words: 101,082

Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources by Geoff Hiscock

Admiral Zheng, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bernie Madoff, BRICs, butterfly effect, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, corporate governance, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

When Molycorp hits its stride at the end of 2012, it expects to be processing 20,000 tonnes a year of oxide, in what it calls its “mines to magnets” strategy. Molycorp also owns a rare-earth processing facility in Estonia, one of only two such plants in Europe. The United States is keen to see a steady supply of strategically critical materials coming from its own mines or from friendly nations. “Diversified global supply chains and multiple sources of materials are required to manage supply risk,” the Department of Energy noted in its December 2010 report. “This means taking steps to facilitate extraction, refining and manufacturing here in the United States, as well as encouraging additional supplies around the world.”2 Industry expert Jack Lifton of Technology Metals Research says that whatever actions the United States takes, the focus must be on the security of the U.S. supply chain for rare earths, and their availability.

It is the main supplier for a variety of rare-earth elements and other scarce metals such as antimony, tungsten, mercury, carbon (graphite), and bismuth.1 That gives it enormous weight in any discussion of what happens next. The United States, Europe, Japan, and India are all big consumers of various commodities and in some cases—such as coal, conventional oil and shale oil/gas in the United States, and coal in India—have substantial supply capacity. But none will dominate global supply chains in the way that China seems likely to do, over the next 20 years. This presupposes, of course, that there is no social implosion in China that leads to a splintering of the country into coastal, hinterland, northern or southern empires. The major long-term task of the expected new team of Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang when they take over as president and premier in 2012–2013 will be to manage continued high economic growth without any further breakdown in social harmony.

Expansion of the Pilbara iron ore region in Western Australia, where BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Fortescue Metals Group, and Hancock Prospecting could lift combined output to almost 1 billion tonnes a year by 2020. Chinese and Japanese groups are major investors. 17. The Mount Weld rare earths mine, Western Australia. Along with Molycorp of the United States, Lynas Corp. is considered the most likely of the many rare earth miners outside China to get finished product into the global supply chain. 18. The brine-based lithium deposits of the “Lithium Triangle,” where Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina meet. Salar de Atacama in Chile is the most productive salt pan, but Bolivia has high hopes for its Salar de Uyuni. 19. The Belo Monte dam in Brazil, due for completion after 2015. Hydropower is a big contributor to Brazil’s energy mix, but Belo Monte raises environmental hackles in the same way as China’s Three Gorges Dam and the various Upper Mekong dam projects. 20.


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

the company said that the prototype’s use had generated $6.5 million: Andrew Sawers, “Foxconn Uses Blockchain for New SCF Platform after $6.5m Pilot,” SCF Briefing, March 17, 2017, http://www.scfbriefing.com/foxconn-launches-scf-blockchain-platform/. Blockchain-proven digital tokens point to what blockchain: Michael J. Casey and Pindar Wong, “Global Supply Chains Are About to Get Better, Thanks to Blockchain,” Harvard Business Review, March 13, 2017, https://hbr.org/2017/03/global-supply-chains-are-about-to-get-better-thanks-to-blockchain. Belt and Road Blockchain Consortium: https://www.beltandroadblockchain.org/. Some have described it as a Beijing-led Marshall Plan: “China’s One Belt, One Road: Will It Reshape Global Trade?”

But, as painful as that would be for the company’s reputation, the reality was actually worse: Chipotle had no way to pinpoint where the dangerous virus got into its food offerings; it only knew that it came from one of its many third-party beef suppliers. Five months later, the best management could come up with was that it “most likely” came from contaminated Australian beef. At the heart of the problem was the lack of visibility that Chipotle—like any food provider—has over the global supply chain of ingredients that flow into its operations. That lack of knowledge meant that Chipotle could neither prevent the contamination before it happened, nor contain it in a targeted way after it was discovered. Supply chains are composed of distinct, inherently independent businesses. Their interests align around the goal of maximizing the sale of an end product—the makers of transistors, chips, capacitors, screens, and other components of a Samsung smartphone will, for example, gain if Samsung experiences rising demand.

To tackle this problem, Regenor’s team at Moog has launched a service it calls Veripart, which uses blockchain technology to, among other things, verify the software design and upgrading work performed by different providers of 3D-printed products along a supply chain. It plans to incorporate a host of features that, among other things, will protect intellectual property and make it more flexible and dynamic as an asset. The team at Moog plans to invite all members of its far-flung global supply chain to participate. Meanwhile, defense contractor Lockheed Martin, one of Moog’s biggest customers, has also seen the light with regard to blockchain’s value in secure work processes within this highly sensitive industry. The company announced that it has entered into a joint venture with Virginia-based GuardTime Federal to integrate blockchain technology into its supply-chain risk management.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

. ▪▪▪ Swabia in the 21st century, is in many ways as wealthy as it has ever been, with high wages, low unemployment, and many leisurely activities. The beautiful city centers of Ravensburg and Friedrichshafen in no way resemble the sorry state they were in in 1945. Ravensburg still provides a welcome for refugees, but this time the wars are further afield. Even the city's puzzle game manufacturer has adapted to a world of global supply chains and jigsaws disrupted by digital gaming. But the puzzle the people of this region, its drivetrain and jigsaw manufacturers, and other societal stakeholders here and in other parts of the world have to solve is not an easy one. It is a global one, with many complex and interdependent pieces.

Despite this, economists today don't regard this era as one of true globalization. Trade had certainly started to become global, and the search for new trade horizons had even been the main reason for starting the Age of Discovery. But the resulting global economy was still very much siloed and lopsided. The European empires set up global supply chains, but most of these were limited to their own colonies and areas of control. Moreover, the colonial model was chiefly one of exploitation. Not only were local civilizations and societies subverted and dismantled, but the slave trade was integral to the new colonial economy. The empires had thus created both a mercantilist and a colonial economy but not a truly globalized one: the exchanges that happened on a global scale were not mutually beneficial or even agreed upon by all parties involved.

At the same time, new technologies from the Third Industrial Revolution, such as the Internet, connected people all over the world in an even more direct way. The orders Keynes could place by phone in 1914 could now be placed over the Internet and delivered through a global network of large ships, trains, and planes. Importantly, members of the middle class had access to the goods produced in the global supply chain. Global trade was no longer a luxury. Instead of having them delivered in a few weeks, they would arrive at one's doorstep in a few days. What was more, the Internet also allowed for a further global integration of value chains. You could do R&D in one country, sourcing in others, production in yet another, and distribution all over the world.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

. ▪▪▪ Swabia in the 21st century, is in many ways as wealthy as it has ever been, with high wages, low unemployment, and many leisurely activities. The beautiful city centers of Ravensburg and Friedrichshafen in no way resemble the sorry state they were in in 1945. Ravensburg still provides a welcome for refugees, but this time the wars are further afield. Even the city's puzzle game manufacturer has adapted to a world of global supply chains and jigsaws disrupted by digital gaming. But the puzzle the people of this region, its drivetrain and jigsaw manufacturers, and other societal stakeholders here and in other parts of the world have to solve is not an easy one. It is a global one, with many complex and interdependent pieces.

Despite this, economists today don't regard this era as one of true globalization. Trade had certainly started to become global, and the search for new trade horizons had even been the main reason for starting the Age of Discovery. But the resulting global economy was still very much siloed and lopsided. The European empires set up global supply chains, but most of these were limited to their own colonies and areas of control. Moreover, the colonial model was chiefly one of exploitation. Not only were local civilizations and societies subverted and dismantled, but the slave trade was integral to the new colonial economy. The empires had thus created both a mercantilist and a colonial economy but not a truly globalized one: the exchanges that happened on a global scale were not mutually beneficial or even agreed upon by all parties involved.

At the same time, new technologies from the Third Industrial Revolution, such as the Internet, connected people all over the world in an even more direct way. The orders Keynes could place by phone in 1914 could now be placed over the Internet and delivered through a global network of large ships, trains, and planes. Importantly, members of the middle class had access to the goods produced in the global supply chain. Global trade was no longer a luxury. Instead of having them delivered in a few weeks, they would arrive at one's doorstep in a few days. What was more, the Internet also allowed for a further global integration of value chains. You could do R&D in one country, sourcing in others, production in yet another, and distribution all over the world.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Or maybe the CEO himself? Or maybe that factory worker wasn’t bribed, but blackmailed? Or maybe he was a CIA line officer all along? The opportunities to sabotage the global supply chain were endless, Gosler told me. My mind also darted back to Times headquarters, to Sulzberger’s closet, to one of those two classified NSA documents Glenn Greenwald was so hesitant to give up—the one that laid out, in intelligence jargon, how the NSA was spiking the global supply chain. The document was a 2013 NSA intelligence budget request, outlining all the ways the agency was circumventing encryption on the web. The NSA called it the SIGINT Enabling Project, and the vast reach of the agency’s meddling and incursion into the world’s digital privacy was disguised in typical agency lingo: The SIGINT Enabling Project actively engages the US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs.

Right above those states in this taxonomy were the Tier III and IV adversaries, who trained their own teams of hackers but also relied on outside contractors to discover zero-day vulnerabilities, write exploits, deploy them on a target, and “make hay,” as Gosler put it. And above those states were the “big dogs,” as Gosler called them, the Tier V and VI nation-states who spent years and billions of dollars finding mission-critical zero-days, developing them into exploits, and—in a feat of glory—inserting them into the global supply chain. The only difference between Tier V states and Tier VIs, Gosler told me, was that the VIs were doing all of this on a massive, push-button scale. At that time, at least, the only countries capable of that level of sabotage were Russia, China, and—though he would never say it—the United States.

I asked how he’d figured out how to hack the world’s most protected networks. “It’s easy,” he told me. “They never anticipated they would be attacked.” Chip manufacturers hired the Gaucho to make sure that their chips were secure. He’d discovered all sorts of ways one could hack chips to get into the global supply chain. He showed me how to hack a chip with a “side channel attack,” sending malware via radio emissions to the copper in the chip itself. There were at least ten of these chips now in every device. “It’s hard to find one that’s been compromised,” he told me—albeit not impossible. The Gaucho had come across other hackers’ handiwork before.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

While the impact of global trade on workers has in recent decades been profoundly uneven – an issue we return to in Chapter 3 – the gains to consumers have been immense, with specialization helping to significantly lower the price of many goods. It is cities that have made this possible, and without them, the complex networks of global supply chains we so rely upon would quickly unravel. Invention While specialization allows societies to make the most of resources given the current state of technology, it is the power of invention that truly pushes the frontier. Thanks to technological progress, billions of people around the world are now able to achieve a level of material comfort that would have been unimaginable only a few centuries ago.

Rather than opening the economy to foreign influence all at once, the Chinese leadership established ‘Special Economic Zones’ in four coastal cities – Shenzhen, Shantou, Zhuhai and Xiamen – in which foreign multinationals were offered tax incentives and a more business-friendly operating environment in exchange for establishing export manufacturing facilities. The rapid success of these early experiments led to the designation of a raft of ‘Open Coastal Cities’ in 1984 that integrated China into global supply chains. As in Japan and Korea, China’s booming population presented a potential hurdle for its transition to a prosperous urban society. By the late 1970s fertility rates had already fallen to around three children per woman, thanks to a combination of concerted government media campaigns and the development of China’s own version of the contraceptive pill.30 However, with rapidly falling mortality rates, the population by 1980 had already hit one billion people, having nearly doubled since the Communist Party took power in 1949.

Bangladesh has established itself as a major manufacturer in the labour-intensive garment industry thanks to its abundant and cheap workforce.64 But robots capable of sewing could soon pull the rug out from underneath Bangladesh’s manufacturing sector.65 For poor economies that have not yet started on the journey, the prospects look even more bleak. With many rich countries actively looking to bring a greater share of manufacturing back home in a bid to keep voters happy and reduce reliance on global supply chains, the challenge is likely to grow. In the absence of the traditional path to industrialization, what other avenues for development are available? Many poor countries blessed with attractive scenery or a warm climate will continue to benefit from tourists. But the jobs this sector creates tend to be relatively low paid, and many poor countries do not have the beaches of Thailand or the wildlife of Tanzania.


pages: 437 words: 115,594

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World by Steven Radelet

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, business climate, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, colonial rule, creative destruction, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, export processing zone, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, megacity, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off grid, oil shock, out of africa, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, women in the workforce, working poor

• The fastest-growing region for mobile broadband penetration is Africa, which leapt from 2 percent penetration in 2010 to 20 percent in 2014.5 THE GLOBALIZATION OF TRADE AND FINANCE—AND VACCINES When working well, global integration provides families and businesses in developing countries with more choices, options, and opportunities for progress. For poor people living on subsistence incomes, the availability of cheaper goods boosts their effective income. Whatever income they have goes further. At the same time, integration creates new markets for exports that can accelerate growth and raise incomes. Global supply chains allow firms to specialize more narrowly, build expertise in specific areas, and sell goods and services into larger global markets, all of which helps create jobs. Telecommunications technologies allow developing countries to provide services—such as backroom accounting or call centers—that didn’t exist a few decades ago.

Similarly, horticulture producers in Uganda and Kenya rely on air transportation to fly fresh-cut flowers grown in greenhouses located near their airports to markets in Europe, where the flowers can be sold on the streets the next morning. FIGURE 7.3: AIR TRAVEL IS MUCH CHEAPER Real Cost per Mile in the United Sates Source: “Annual Round-Trip Fares and Fees: Domestic,” Airlines for America. More important, cheaper airfares mean that people can move much more easily, and with them ideas and knowledge. Global supply chains benefit from managers and engineers connecting on the internet and by cell phones, but also from the ease with which people can move from one city to the next for planning and problem solving. Businesses are much more connected and integrated because people can move so easily. Inexpensive airfares also have been crucial to the growth of tourism.

More extensive trade, and the skills and technologies that come with it, will continue to be a major driver of growth in the decades to come. In a more globalized world, businesses in developing countries will look for opportunities to specialize, find niche markets, and integrate themselves into global supply chains. Financial and insurance markets need further development, since access to finance remains a major constraint for many businesses, especially small ones. In many countries, considerable scope remains for reducing tariff and other trade restrictions. In others, limited amounts of protection may be helpful in some circumstances, especially if tariffs are time limited and applied in sectors where firms can become competitive quickly.


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

I then hopped to the very different island of Manhattan, spending four years at the United Nations on the team writing the annual flagship Human Development Report, while witnessing barefaced power games block progress in international negotiations. I left to fulfil a long-held ambition and worked with Oxfam for over a decade. There I witnessed the precarious existences of women – from Bangladesh to Birmingham – employed at the sharp end of global supply chains. We lobbied to change the rigged rules and double standards governing international trade rules. And I explored the human-rights implications of climate change, meeting farmers from India to Zambia whose fields had been turned to bare earth because the rains had never come. Then I became a mother – of twins, to boot – and spent a year on maternity leave, immersed in the bare-bum economy of raising infants.

Thanks to the scale of global income inequality, responsibility for global greenhouse gas emissions is highly skewed: the top 10% of emitters – think of them as the global carbonistas living on every continent – generate around 45% of global emissions, while the bottom 50% of people contribute only 13%.43 Food consumption is deeply skewed too. Around 13% of people worldwide are malnourished. How much food would it take to meet their caloric needs? Just 3% of the global food supply. To put that in context, 30%–50% of the world’s food gets lost post-harvest, wasted in global supply chains, or scraped off dinner plates and into kitchen bins.44 Hunger could, in effect, be ended with just 10% of the food that never gets eaten. From these examples it is clear that getting into the Doughnut calls for a far more equitable distribution of humanity’s use of resources. A third factor is aspiration: whatever people consider necessary for a good life.

Acemoglu, D. and Robinson, J. (2013) Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. London: Profile Books. 45. Goodman, P. (2008) ‘Taking a hard new look at Greenspan legacy’, New York Times, 8 October 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/business/economy/09greenspan.html?pagewanted=all 46. Raworth, K. (2002) Trading Away Our Rights: women workers in global supply chains. Oxford: Oxfam International. 47. Chang, H-J. (2010) 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism, London: Allen Lane. 48. Ferguson, T. (1995) Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems. London: University of Chicago Press, p. 8. 49.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

I took the machine in with all the wonder of a seven-year-old. Until then, I had only seen computers depicted in TV shows and movies. Here was one I could touch. But it was more remarkable, I think now, that such a contraption had even got to a small suburb of Lusaka in Zambia in the 1970s. The global supply chain was primordial, and remote shopping all but non-existent – and yet the first signs of the digital revolution were already visible. The build-it-yourself kit piqued my interest. Two years later, I got my own first computer: a Sinclair ZX81, picked up in the autumn of 1981, a year after moving to a small town in the hinterlands beyond London.

And new technologies, and the businesses built on them, often need large numbers of people interacting with each other in close proximity – something only cities can offer. As the twenty-first century unfolds, the localising potential of technology will only become more powerful. The coronavirus pandemic which began in 2020 showed how fragile global supply chains could be. But if it was a virus in 2020, it could be war or extreme weather – exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change – in the future. The result is an era in which, once again, geography matters – with economic activity set to become increasingly local. There is an irony here. The economic paradigm that brought about the Exponential Age, globalisation, has fostered technologies that will lead to a return to the local.

Analysts at the Dutch bank ING reckon it might eliminate up to 40 per cent of world imports by 2040.23 This sum is colossal – an estimated $22 trillion – and will wipe out a decade’s growth in the trade of goods and services. And if such proximate, distributed manufacturing did take hold, it would transform the whole nature of the global supply chain. UPS, the preeminent global logistics company, has already started to invest in technologies that will enable it to print parts that its customers need in a trice – instead of delivering packages across the world.24 Thanks to the compounding effect of these technologies, finished products won’t need to be shipped from Mexico or Bangladesh; they can be printed in a nearby facility.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Writing in the early weeks of the pandemic, the author Zachary Karabell concluded that once we examine the data more closely, “we are likely to find fresh confirmation of what we already know about globalization: that it’s easy to hate, convenient to target and impossible to stop.” The current anti-globalization argument is that we are all too intertwined, our lives and economies so entangled that we have lost control over our own destiny. One particular element of this concern is that in an emergency like Covid-19, global supply chains make us vulnerable to critical shortages in medical goods. The new conventional wisdom is that some things must be manufactured locally. It is hardly the first time we have seen renewed anxiety about the loss of control that accompanies a bewildering global economy. In the late 1960s, Harold Wilson, as prime minister of Great Britain, faced pressures from international markets and vowed to resist the “gnomes of Zurich.”

At the height of the pandemic in mid-March 2020, the arteries of world trade narrowed and clogged up. With far fewer flights, the per-pound cost of transporting goods across the Pacific tripled. Seeking security, many governments—from the EU to Japan to India—announced their resolve to pursue greater self-sufficiency, or at least make the system of global supply chains more resilient. Even previously committed globalists suddenly began talking about “reshoring.” In a national address, French president Emmanuel Macron lamented his country’s “dependence on other continents,” and announced his new post-pandemic goal would be to achieve the “independence of France” in technology and industry.

The US president largely dismissed international warnings about the disease, and when he finally acted, did so unilaterally, not even bothering to inform his closest European allies before announcing travel bans on those countries. Predictably, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and India’s Narendra Modi—populist nationalists like Trump—approached the pandemic with a similar distrust of any kind of global efforts or multilateral solutions. Modi reminded Indians of the dangers of global supply chains and urged that they be “vocal for local,” buying and promoting all things Made in India. But the pandemic seems to have brought out nationalism even in places where one would least expect it, like Europe. Nationalists like to point out that multilateral cooperation didn’t stop the pandemic.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

As Priscilla Moriuchi, the director of strategic threat development at a Massachusetts cybersecurity company, has warned, “It’s the technologies of the future and technologies of future security systems that could be the biggest security threat in the Belt and Road project.”32 All of these efforts amount to a bewildering mix of corporate deal-making and state-sponsored extortion. They traverse a tangle of undersea cables, next-generation wireless networks, and global supply chains. But broadly speaking, we can break China’s back-end strategy for dominating the Internet into four main components: controlling the production, controlling the pipes, controlling the protocols, and controlling the post-4G future. To help make sense of how these four puzzle pieces fit together, consider the many steps involved in sending a simple email.

If you turn it over—you might have to take off that cracked iPhone cover—you’ll see the words “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” This inscription hints at the first piece of the back-end puzzle. Even as China seeks to control the world’s Internet networks, it already grasps many of the networks that build the networks—our global supply chains. As with the hardware that spirits our emails and search queries around the globe, most of us rarely spare a thought for the complex global web that produces everything from computers to cars. Still fewer likely dwell on where so many of these supply chains lead. More often than not, the answer is the warehouses and factory floors of China.

The application layer transforms that data into what you see on your web browser or email client. All of these layers work together to make sure that the right data gets to the right place in the right fashion.103 China’s aggressive effort to win the back-end battle is not limited to the gleaming factories that make up our global supply chains or the cables buried deep beneath the sea and the earth. Beijing’s ambitions also reach into decidedly less glamorous locations: the bureaucratic and buttoned-down multilateral bodies where technical standards are hammered out. Because in addition to controlling the production and the pipes, China is steadily gaining influence over network protocols.


pages: 159 words: 45,073

GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History by Diane Coyle

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, Diane Coyle, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial intermediation, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Les Trente Glorieuses, Long Term Capital Management, Mahbub ul Haq, mutually assured destruction, Nathan Meyer Rothschild: antibiotics, new economy, Occupy movement, Phillips curve, purchasing power parity, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, University of East Anglia, working-age population

Achieving a higher standard of living with fewer demands on natural and labor resources will help ease price pressures and continue this decade’s good news on inflation,” wrote the Dallas Fed’s economists in 1998.4 The promises of “mass customization” they dangled before their readers’ eyes in 1998 are coming to pass, including TV shows on demand so viewers, not schedulers, determine the evening’s viewing; or clothing made-to-measure for the midmarket many, not just the wealthy few. Separate statistical headaches arise from the increasing complexity of the economy, due to the fact that most goods are now “made” in global supply chains. The components will be manufactured in a number of countries, shipped around the world to be assembled in one place, and shipped back out to their destination markets. This is true of goods as apparently simple as a shirt or as sophisticated as an iPhone.5 China, of course, has been the main country of assembly in these global chains, but other Asian countries and their Latin American competitors Brazil and Mexico have been gaining ground.

See financial intermediation services indirectly measured Fitoussi, Jean-Paul, 118, 139 Fleming, Alexander, 63 Ford, Henry, 45 France, 8–9, 103 Frank, Robert, 112 free market ideology, 93 Friedman, Thomas, 95–96 Gagarin, Yuri, 47 Geary-Khamis dollars, 52 Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), 116, 137 Georgiou, Andreas, 1–2, 4 Germany, 17, 41–42, 71 Ghana, 32, 53, 94, 107 Gilbert, Milton, 15, 50 globalization, 93–94 global supply chains, 125 Golden Age, 43, 56 Gosplan, 29 government expenditures (G), 27–29 government role in economy, 14–17, 19–21, 23, 63–66, 77–78. See also fiscal policy; monetary policy; policy and politics government services, 38–39 Great Depression, 12–13, 119, 121 Greece, 1–5, 72, 73, 138 Greenspan, Alan, 83, 88, 94, 102 Gross Domestic Product (GDP): adjustments and reforms of, 92, 117, 136–38; availability of country data on, 78; calculation issues in, 2, 32–34, 52–54; circular flow model of, 26–27, 27f, 57, 63; complexity of, 24–25, 28–31; concept of, 4–5, 24–31 (see also purpose and meanings of); country comparisons of, 42; criticisms of, 5, 14, 104, 110–11; future of, 121–40; GNP vs., 25; “gross” component of, 25, 30; HDI correlated with, 73–74; importance of, 1–6, 42, 135–36; information gathering for, 33, 37, 51–53, 137–38; international comparisons of, 48–57; issues facing, 121–35; loans influenced by, 3; origins of, 7, 16–18, 119–20; postwar, 43–45, 43t, 62–63; purpose and meanings of, 5–6, 92, 121, 136, 138–40 (see also concept of); recommendations concerning, 136–40; revisions of, 36; spending-income relationship in, 30, 33–34; statistical patterns in, 3; well-being and welfare correlated with, 111, 117, 136; well-being and welfare not measured by, 5, 14, 40, 91–92, 111–14, 124–25, 136, 140 Gross National Product (GNP), 15–16, 25, 115–16 Guevara, Che, 68 Haldane, Andrew, 99, 101 happiness, 5, 6, 110–13, 136, 137.


pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

That mentality is reflected in the title of a book by former Intel CEO Andy Grove: Only the Paranoid Survive.56 It is impossible to know the exact locations where all the components of a laptop were drilled for, mined, or made, because of the increasingly complex supply chain of the electronics industry, which the UN reports has the most globalized supply chain of all industries.57 But we do know that all the problematic mining practices described in the chapter on extraction—for gold and tantalum, as well as copper, aluminum, lead, zinc, nickel, tin, silver, iron, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, cadmium, and chromium—are involved. The brand name company—Dell, HP, IBM, Apple, etc.

But ultimately, we must remember—as Allegheny College political science professor Michael Maniates says—the choices available to us as consumers are limited and predetermined by forces outside the shopping market. Those forces can best be changed through social and political activism.20 Trucks and Container Ships and Planes, Oh My! Ships, trucks, roads, planes, and trains are needed to move Stuff along this globalized supply chain. The transportation infrastructure consumes enormous quantities of fossil fuels and spews out waste, but these are some of the most hidden of externalized costs in consumer goods, and most people are completely unaware of them. Even those shoppers who are aware of the source of the materials in products, the ones who know to ask whether diamonds fueled violence in Africa or whether the cotton fields in Turkey used pesticides, rarely know what to ask about how goods are transported.

United Parcel Service, or UPS, has launched trucks with hydraulic hybrid technology that are supposed to “increase fuel efficiency by 60–70% in urban use and lowers greenhouse gas emissions by 40%, compared to UPS’s conventional diesel delivery trucks.”41 Not to be outdone, FedEx has peppered its fleet with hybrid electric vehicles that decrease particulate emissions by 96 percent and go 57 percent farther on a gallon of fuel than a conventional FedEx truck, reducing fuel costs by more than one-third.42 DHL has launched its own version of carbon offsets, offering customers the ability to tack on a 3 percent extra fee that DHL promises to invest in “green projects like vehicle technology, solar panels and reforestation.”43 Nice as those efforts sound, they don’t get to the crux of the problem, which is this set of massive global supply chains (as long as ten thousand miles, according to some experts44), the consumer demand for more cheap Stuff delivered faster and faster, and the economic rules governing the whole show, which make it more profitable to make Stuff on the other side of the planet than close to home. With all of the above in mind, let’s look at the retail distribution of the same three items we zeroed in on last chapter.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

This smile curve is also consistent with the trend called “servicification” of manufacturing since the total value being added in what looks like the manufacturing sector (the fabrication stages) is falling while the value being added in what look like service sectors is rising. SOURCE: Baldwin, “Global Supply Chains: Why They Emerged, Why They Matter, and Where They Are Going,” Centre for Economic Policy Research, Discussion Paper No. 9103, August 2012. Figure 18. Today, most Apple products are designed in California and Apple handles the marketing, distribution, after-sales service, and many add-on services via its App Store, iTunes, etc.

Someone has to be in charge of getting each task done, so the next level is “occupations,” defined as the individual workers performing the task (often with the help of machinery). In most production processes, workers are placed close to other workers, which defines the third natural grouping: stages. In most cases, the second unbundling (which is to say offshoring) concerns stages of production, not occupations or tasks. SOURCE: Richard Baldwin, “Global Supply Chains: Why They Emerged, Why They Matter, and Where They Are Going,” in Global Value Chains in a Changing World, ed. Deborah K. Elms and Patrick Low (Geneva: World Trade Organization, 2013). Figure 11. The Specialization versus Coordination Tradeoff Deciding how to organize production is impossibly complex in the real world—that is, in the world of Mein Herr’s one-mile-to-the-mile-map world.

Communication Technology (CT), however, is only one half of the ICT revolution. The other half concerns Information Technology (IT). As the discussion about production unbundling in Chapter 6 makes clear, both IT and CT affect the course of offshoring, but they work in opposite directions. When thinking about the future of global supply chains, we must speculate about the possibility of truly revolutionary IT developments. One such possible development relates to computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM). This is not futurology. It has already had a big impact. It has already produced a tectonic shift in manufacturing in high-wage nations—moving manufacturing from a situation where machines helped workers make things to a situation where workers help machines make things.


pages: 389 words: 87,758

No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends by Richard Dobbs, James Manyika

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, business cycle, business intelligence, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, circular economy, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, demographic dividend, deskilling, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, job automation, Just-in-time delivery, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, pension time bomb, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Great Moderation, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Zipcar

The accelerations in global interconnectivity require an intuition reset on the part of companies. They must plan early to scale up globally, tailor business models to new markets, get to know new competitors, develop global talent, and prepare for shocks and volatility in an increasingly interconnected world economy. Businesses that focused mainly on cost effectiveness in global supply chains now need to consider how “value” chains may evolve—who the participants may be, which regions could play a role, and how value could shift along the value chain. Just as the introduction of electricity was an important factor in pushing the world’s industrialized economies into higher gear a century ago, the current of economic energy from global economic flows coursing through the system offers similar potential today.

In fast-growing developing economies, more than 143,000 Internet-related businesses launch every year.57 Jumia, a Nigerian e-commerce company that now operates in Ivory Coast, Kenya, Egypt, and Morocco, in 2013 became the first African winner of the World Retail Award for “Best Retail Launch of the Year.”58 M-pesa, a mobile-money service started in Kenya, is now disrupting traditional banking, payments, and money-transfer service providers across Africa. Build New Global—and Digital—Ecosystems Digital platforms enable companies to expand rapidly and profitably to customers further away from their home markets than was possible in the past. Building cross-border ecosystems ranging from global supply chains to innovation networks could help companies take advantage of this opportunity. Many companies are exploiting global interconnections and digital platforms to weave together networks of suppliers, distributors, and after-sales service providers—not just for procurement but also for preemptive maintenance that reduces production downtime, and for more efficient parts supply.

., “The great rebalancing.” 43. Atsmon et al., “Winning the $30 trillion decathlon.” 44. Chatterjee et al., “The decade ahead.” 45. Tom Glaser, “2013 investor day,” VF Corporation, June 11, 2013, www.vf17×17.com/pdf/2013%20VFC%20Investor%20Day-Glaser%20Transcript.pdf; Gary P. Pisano and Pamela Adams, VF Brands: Global Supply Chain Strategy, Harvard Business School case number 610–022, November 2009, www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=38127. 46. Atsmon et al., “Winning the $30 trillion decathlon.” 47. Alejandro Diaz, Max Magni, and Felix Poh, “From oxcart to Wal-Mart: Four keys to reaching emerging-market consumers,” McKinsey Quarterly, October 2012. 48.


pages: 345 words: 100,989

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal by Duncan Mavin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, Eyjafjallajökull, financial engineering, fixed income, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Kickstarter, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Masayoshi Son, means of production, Menlo Park, mittelstand, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, Ponzi scheme, private military company, proprietary trading, remote working, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, supply chain finance, Tim Haywood, Vision Fund, WeWork, work culture

One of Gorman’s businesses was selling farming equipment and supplies. He found himself pitching agricultural equipment to Peter, who explained what his brother Lex was up to. Gorman invited Lex to Florida, where he owned an expansive waterfront property. Lex turned on the charm and explained his vision of a global supply chain finance business. By the end of their meeting, instead of Gorman selling tractors to Greensill Farming Group, Lex had persuaded the veteran businessman to invest in Greensill Capital. The company’s accounts show that Gorman, who joined the Greensill board, loaned the company about $24 million.

Greensill quickly dropped the client, and earned the praise of Carnell again, which was followed by the usual sort of Greensill press release, this one touting the ombudsman’s praise. The whole episode was like a naughty child scolded by their parents for misbehaving, then earning faint praise for doing the right thing. Greensill was claiming credit for no longer helping its clients bully suppliers. IN AUGUST 2020, the Global Supply Chain Finance Forum, an industry lobby group, put out its own report on the industry bullies. The decision to speak out was a sure sign that the problem was significant, although the report predictably claimed that bullying was rare. Authored by the likes of the International Chamber of Commerce and the European Banking Association, the report clearly sought to put some distance between best practices and the kind of approach taken by some of Greensill’s clients.

Index Aar Tee Commodities ref1 Abengoa ref1, ref2 Accenture ref1, ref2 Agritrade ref1 Ahearn, John ref1 AIG ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Aigis Banca ref1, ref2 Allesch-Taylor, Stefan ref1, ref2 Allin, Patrick ref1 anti-money-laundering (AML) questions ref1 ANZ ref1 Apollo Global Management ref1, ref2 Apple ref1 Aramco ref1 ArcelorMittal ref1 Archegos ref1 Arthur Andersen ref1 Asda ref1 Atlantic 57 Consultancy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Auditing Association of German Banks ref1 Augustus Asset Managers ref1 Austin, Jason ref1, ref2 Australia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19 Australian Taxation Office ref1 Aviva ref1 BAE Systems ref1 Baer, Julius ref1, ref2 BaFin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Bailey, Andrew ref1 Bank of America ref1 Bank of England ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Barclays ref1, ref2 Barnes, Rob ref1, ref2, ref3 Barrell, Neil ref1 Barron’s ref1, ref2, ref3 Bates, Chris ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Battershill, William ref1, ref2 Baylis, Natalie ref1 BBB see British Business Bank BBC News ref1 BBVA ref1 BCLP see Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner BDO ref1, ref2 Becker, Arthur ref1 Berkshire Hathaway ref1 Bethell, Richard, 6th Baron Westbury ref1, ref2 Bingera ref1 Bishop, Julie ref1, ref2 BlackRock ref1, ref2, ref3 Blackstone ref1 Blair, Tony ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bloomberg ref1, ref2, ref3 Bloomberg News ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bluestone Resources Inc. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Blunkett, David ref1, ref2 BNP Paribas ref1 Boeing ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 737 Max 8 aircraft ref1 Bond and Credit Company, The (TBCC) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Borbely, Barnabas ref1 Borneo ref1 Breedon, Tim ref1 Breedon report ref1 Brereton, Greg ref1 Brexit referendum ref1 Brierwood, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Brighthouse ref1 British Business Bank (BBB) ref1, ref2, ref3 British Gas ref1 Brown, Eliot ref1 Brown, Gordon ref1, ref2 Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner (BCLP) ref1 BSi Steel ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Buckingham Palace ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Buffett, Warren ref1 Bundaberg, Queensland, Australia ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Bunge ref1 Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy committee ref1 Cabinet Office ref1, ref2, ref3 Caillaux, Gabe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Callahan, Mark ref1 Cameron, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘Big Society’ policy ref1 and Earnd ref1 Greensill remuneration ref1 and Greensill’s collapse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 hired as Greensill adviser ref1, ref2 lends credibility to Greensill ref1 and Lex ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 and Mohammed Bin Salman ref1 and the pharmacy plan ref1 role at Greensill during the Covid-19 pandemic ref1 and The Bond and Credit Company ref1 Cameron, Samantha ref1 Cameron administration ref1, ref2 Cantor Fitzgerald ref1, ref2, ref3 Carillion ref1, ref2 ‘early payment facility’ ref1 Carlyle Group ref1 Carna ref1 Carnell, Kate ref1, ref2 Carney, Mark ref1 Carrington ref1 Carson Block ref1 Carusillo, Mickey ref1 Casey, Dame Louise ref1 ‘cash-less rolls’ ref1 Catfoss group ref1, ref2, ref3 central banks ref1 Chap (magazine) ref1 Charles, Prince ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Chase Manhattan ref1 CHBG Limited ref1 Chehaoduo ref1, ref2 Chelsea Group ref1 Chelsea Village ref1 Chicago Police Pension Fund ref1 Chilean mining ref1 Chubb ref1 Chuk ref1 CIMIC ref1, ref2 Citibank ref1 Citigroup ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 City, the ref1 Clarke, Tracy ref1 Clearbrook Capital ref1 Cleland, Robert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 coal mining ref1, ref2, ref3 Coca-Cola ref1, ref2 CoFace ref1 Comerford, Robert J. ref1, ref2 Commerzbank ref1 Companies House ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Confederation of British Industry (CBI) ref1 Conservative government ref1, ref2 Copenhagen ref1 Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) ref1, ref2 Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS) ref1, ref2 corporate espionage ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Coupe, Mike ref1 Covid-19 Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF) ref1, ref2 Covid-19 pandemic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 government loan schemes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 restrictions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Crain’s (magazine) ref1 Credit Suisse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 and the Covid-19 pandemic ref1 and Greensill Capital ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33 and Sanjeev Gupta ref1 Crothers, Bill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Crown Representatives programme ref1 Cunliffe, Sir Jon ref1 CWB ref1 de Botton, Alain ref1 de Botton, Gilbert ref1 de la Rue, Tom ref1 Deal Partners ref1, ref2, ref3 Degen, Michel ref1, ref2, ref3 Dell ref1 Deloitte ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Demica ref1 Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy ref1, ref2 Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs ref1 Department of Health ref1 Department of Health and Social Care ref1 Department of Work and Pensions ref1 Deutsche Bank ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Deutsche Börse ref1 Doordash ref1 Doran, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 dotcom boom ref1, ref2 Dow Jones ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Downes, Brett ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Dragon Technology ref1, ref2, ref3 Eadie, Al ref1 Earnd ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Ecclestone, Bernie ref1 Edelman ref1 1860 Munich ref1 Ellis, Brett Easton, American Psycho ref1 Enterprise Investment Schemes (EISs) ref1 equity warrants ref1 Ernst & Young ref1 see also EY Euler Hermes ref1, ref2 European Banking Association ref1 Ewing, Fergus ref1 EY ref1, ref2 see also Ernst & Young Eyjafjallajökull ref1 factoring ref1, ref2, ref3 see also supply chain finance Fair Financial ref1, ref2, ref3 Fairmac Reality ref1 Fairymead ref1 Fan, Colin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Farrell, Maureen ref1 FCA see Financial Conduct Authority ‘fee ramp agreements’ ref1 Feeney, Chuck ref1 Ferrin, Ronald ref1 Fidelity ref1 5th Finger ref1 Finacity ref1 Financial Accounting Standards Board ref1 Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Skilled Persons Reviews ref1, ref2 financial crisis 2008 ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 aftermath ref1, ref2, ref3 and central banks ref1 and fintechs ref1 tougher regulations following ref1, ref2 Financial News (banking publication) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Financial Reporting Council ref1 Financial Times (newspaper) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Finews (Swiss news site) ref1 ‘fintechs’ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Fitch ref1 ‘flash title’ ref1 Fleetsolve ref1 Food Revolution Group ref1 Forbes (magazine) ref1 Ford ref1 Ford, Bill ref1 Formula One ref1 ‘Four Eyes Principle’ ref1 FreeUp ref1, ref2 Friedman, Alex ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Galligan, Shane ref1, ref2 GAM Greensill Supply Chain Finance fund (GGSCF) ref1, ref2 Gapper, John ref1 Garrod, Neil ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 GBM Banca ref1 General Atlantic (GA) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20 General Mills ref1, ref2, ref3 Gentleman’s Journal (magazine) ref1 German Deposit Protection Authority ref1 Global Asset Management (GAM) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26 Absolute Return Bond Fund (ARBF) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 regulators ref1 Global Supply Chain Finance Forum ref1 Global Trade Review (trade finance publication) ref1 Goldman Sachs ref1, ref2 Gorman, John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Gottstein, Thomas ref1, ref2 government loans ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘GovTech’ firms ref1 Grant Thornton ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Gray, Sue ref1 Green, Philip ref1, ref2 Greenbrier hotel ref1 Greene, Stephen ref1 Greensill, Alexander ‘Lex’ David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 ambition ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ascent ref1 Australian property investments ref1, ref2 Australian tax obligations ref1 awards ref1, ref2, ref3 CBE ref1, ref2, ref3 birth ref1 and Carillion ref1 celebrity status ref1 childhood ref1, ref2 at Citigroup ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 on the Crown Representatives programme ref1 CV ref1 and Daniel Sheard ref1 and David Cameron ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 directorships ref1 double down strategy ref1, ref2 and Downes ref1 dresses the part ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Duncan Mavin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 eager to own bank ref1, ref2 education ref1 legal studies ref1 MBA at the Alliance Manchester Business School ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 and 5th Finger ref1 and Greensill Bank AG (formerly NoFi) ref1 and Greensill Capital ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 acquisitions ref1, ref2 aircraft leasing deals ref1 attempts to raise emergency finance ref1, ref2, ref3 avoids toughest regulators ref1 BaFin probe ref1 Bluestone ref1, ref2 BSi ref1 Covid-19 pandemic ref1, ref2, ref3 Credit Suisse involvements ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 demise ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Dragon Technology ref1 expansion ref1, ref2, ref3 ‘flak’ (PR advisers) ref1 General Atlantic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Global Asset Management ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 harmful effect of SCF on small businesses ref1 insurance ref1, ref2, ref3 malpractice ref1 multi-obligor programmes ref1 National Health Service venture ref1, ref2 new category of loans ref1 payroll finance ref1 perilous state ref1 premier ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 sells company private jets ref1 Softbank dealings ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 start-up ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Tower Trade ref1 Tradeshift Networks ref1, ref2 and Jeremy Heywood ref1 and John Gorman ref1 legal work ref1 marriage ref1 and Masayoshi Son ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 mentors ref1 mission statement, ‘helping out the little guy’ ref1 and Mohammed Bin Salman ref1 at Morgan Stanley ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 remuneration ref1 moves to the UK ref1, ref2 at OzEcom ref1 and politics ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘rewilding’ project ref1 risk-taking ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 and Sanjeev Gupta ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 and Saudi Arabia ref1 sits on Bank of England committee on SCF ref1 skiing ref1 spending ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 takes loan from the Greensill family ref1 and Tim Haywood ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 at TRM ref1, ref2 wealth ref1 billionaire status ref1, ref2 hits the big time ref1, ref2 Greensill, Andrew (Lex’s brother) ref1 Greensill, Judy (Lex’s mother) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Greensill, Lloyd (Lex’s father) ref1, ref2, ref3 Greensill, Peter (Lex’s youngest brother) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Greensill, Roy (Lex’s grandfather) ref1, ref2 Greensill, Victoria (Lex’s wife) ref1, ref2 Greensill Bank AG (formerly NoFi) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and the Atlantic 57 loan ref1, ref2 and the BaFin probe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and the end ref1, ref2 and General Atlantic ref1 and government loans ref1 and Gupta ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 private aircraft ref1 regulation ref1 and Softbank ref1, ref2 technology ref1 and trade credit insurance ref1, ref2 whistle-blower at ref1 Greensill Capital ref1, ref2 aircraft leasing deals ref1 allegations of corruption at ref1 and the Atlantic 57 loan ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 avoids toughest regulators ref1 and the BaFin probe ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 and Bill Crothers ref1 billion dollar plus valuation ref1 and Bluestone ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and BSi ref1 business cards ref1, ref2 cash burner ref1 client list ref1 collapse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 corporate events ref1 corporate governance ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and the Covid-19 pandemic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 and Credit Suisse ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24, ref25, ref26, ref27, ref28, ref29, ref30, ref31, ref32, ref33 Credit Suisse’s investigation into ref1, ref2, ref3 crisis mounts ref1, ref2, ref3 and David Cameron ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and David Solo ref1, ref2, ref3 defaults ref1, ref2 and Dragon Technology ref1 early backers ref1 early struggles ref1, ref2 evergreen loans ref1 ‘everyone wins’ pitches ref1 expansion ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 external public relations ref1, ref2 EY investigation into ref1 fault lines ref1 as ‘fintech’ company ref1, ref2 fraud and misconduct allegations ref1 and General Atlantic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15 and Global Asset Management ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22 gossipy culture ref1 and Greensill Bank ref1 and Griffin Coal ref1 and Gupta/Gupta Family Group ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14 harmful impact on small businesses ref1 headquarters on the Strand ref1 ‘High Risk Franchise Names’ document ref1 hits the big time ref1, ref2 illiquid investments ref1 insolvency ref1, ref2 investment protection ref1 investors abandon ref1, ref2 IPO ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 and John Gorman ref1 and Katerra ref1 and the Lagoon Park SPV ref1 launch ref1, ref2 lavish spending at ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Lex’s claims about ref1 liquidity ref1, ref2 and Lloyds ref1 loan book ref1 losses ref1 and Maurice Thompson ref1 Morgan Stanley employees ref1 and the NHS ref1, ref2, ref3 obligors ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 offices ref1, ref2, ref3 and payroll finance ref1 and Pemex ref1 perilous state ref1 and the pharmacy plan ref1 pre-IPO funding (‘Project Olive’) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 profitability issues ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 ‘reasonably permanent’ funding ref1 reducing the early risks of using ref1 remuneration ref1, ref2, ref3 retrenchment ref1, ref2 risk team ref1, ref2 risky ventures ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 and Roland Hartley-Urquhart ref1 and Saudi Arabia ref1 as ‘shadow bank’ ref1 and SoftBank ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18, ref19, ref20, ref21, ref22, ref23, ref24 SPAC talks ref1 start-up style management ref1, ref2 takes loan from the Greensill Capital family ref1 technology ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Tim Haywood ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 and Tower Trade ref1, ref2, ref3 and trade credit insurance ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 ‘Unicorn’ status ref1 and the US capital markets ref1 whistle-blower allegations emerge ref1 and the Wickham SPV ref1 Greensill Corporation Pty ref1 Greensill Farming Group ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Greensill Trust ref1 Grenda Investments ref1 Griffin Coal ref1, ref2 Gross, Bill ref1 Guazi ref1 Gulf Petrochem (GP Global) ref1 Gupta, Nicola ref1 Gupta, Sanjeev ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17 Australian property ref1 and Bluestone ref1 and the demise of Greensill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and German steel ref1 and Grant Thornton ref1 and Greensill Bank ref1 Gupta Family Group (GFG) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 and Bluestone ref1 and government loans ref1 and Greensill ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 and Greensill Bank ref1 Guttridge, Jane ref1, ref2 Guy, Toby ref1 Gymshark ref1 Haas, Lukas ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Hambro, Jay ref1 Hanafin, Dermot ref1 Hanafin, Sean ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Harris, Piers ref1 Harry, Prince ref1 Hart ref1 Hartley-Urquhart, Roland ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Havens, John ref1, ref2 Haywood, Tim ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15, ref16, ref17, ref18 Henkel ref1 Hewlett Packard ref1 Heywood, Jeremy ref1, ref2, ref3 Highways Agency ref1 HM Revenue & Customs ref1 HM Treasury ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Hobday, Neil ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Holmes, Elizabeth ref1 House of Lords ref1 HSBC ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Huawei ref1, ref2, ref3 Hutton Inquiry ref1 IAG see Insurance Australia Group ICBC Standard Bank ref1 Indonesia ref1 Industrial Cadets ref1 Inflexionpoint ref1 ING ref1 Insurance Australia Group (IAG) ref1, ref2, ref3 International Chamber of Commerce ref1 Intrepid Aviation ref1 ‘Iran Notices’ ref1 Iraq, UN weapons inspectors ref1 Isle of Dogs ref1 Jacob, David ref1, ref2, ref3 Jahama Highland Estates ref1 Jain, Anshu ref1 Jakarta ref1 Jardine Matheson ref1 Johnson, Boris ref1 Jones, Karen ref1 J.P.


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

It was the same phenomenon that led Sornette (who cited Tainter’s work) to forecast a looming societal collapse—and Bar-Yam wholly agreed. “Complexity leads to higher vulnerability,” he told the New Scientist. “This is not widely understood.” Breakdowns in a highly complex system can spread due to the interlocking networks, like the global supply chain, which act like a vast complex ecosystem with myriad choke points. A car dealer in Rapid City can’t sell cars because Ford can’t get the computer chips it needs because a factory in Taiwan got flooded. A single container ship foundering in the Suez Canal disrupts supply chains worldwide. “The networks that connect us can amplify any shocks.

An extreme geomagnetic solar storm that could shut down critical electricity, GPS, and transportation infrastructure around the world for days or months. Accelerating global warming that acts as a risk multiplier amplifying wildfires, flooding, and other natural disasters. Animal disease. Food or critical resource failures, driving a global supply-chain shock. Widespread electricity failure. Widespread telecommunication failure. Widespread cyberattack. “While these scenarios often seem extreme, in our highly interconnected society they may be much more likely than people think,” Neal warned. CHAPTER 23 THE GREAT DILEMMA OF RISK Nassim Taleb lay sprawled in his bed on the top floor of a house in Beirut breathing through an oxygen mask.

In Skin in the Game, he wrote somewhat approvingly of Putin, arguing that his position as an autocrat who doesn’t face elections allows him to act “as a free citizen confronting slaves who need committees, approval, and who of course feel like they have to fit their decisions to an immediate rating.” “It turns out there’s no mild version of nationalism,” Taleb told me. The war triggered economic and financial cascades that rippled worldwide. Oil prices surged, providing another kicker to inflationary pressures that had started with Covid and its stranglehold on global supply chains. Stocks nose-dived, hitting bear-market territory in weeks. “The market is in a state of shock,” Brian O’Reilly, head of market strategy at Mediolanum International Funds, told Morningstar in March. Nickel prices doubled in a day amid jitters that the war would disrupt access to the metal—Russia was one of its biggest producers.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

By this offshoring-friendly definition, if a firm shuts down a factory in the US (GDP per capita in 2017: $59,500 in purchasing power parity) and opens a factory with much cheaper workers in China ($16,700) or Indonesia ($12,400) or Venezuela ($12,100), the resulting exports to the US market are “not from a low-wage country to a high-wage country.”12 In contrast with MGI, the Nobel laureate economist Michael Spence claims that “labor arbitrage has been the core driver of global supply chains for at least three decades—with significant distributional and employment effects.”13 According to the Commerce Department, between 1999 and 2009 US multinational corporations cut 864,600 workers in the US while adding 2.9 million workers abroad. Fifty-seven percent of the foreign hiring by nonfinancial companies was in Asia, with multinationals adding 683,000 workers in China and 392,000 workers in India.

Compared to more direct prolabor measures like minimum wages, collective bargaining and limits on global labor arbitrage, pulverizing the most productive firms in the economy is a very roundabout and inefficient way to try to raise wages, like burning down a barn to roast a pig in the famous fable by Charles Lamb.12 Like redistributionism, antimonopolism cannot work at the national level in today’s system of liberalized trade and globalized production. If the Justice Department used antitrust to break up large suppliers in the US, firms that coordinate global supply chains could simply shift those links in production to foreign countries with more lenient competition policies. The result could be accelerated by American deindustrialization, with further massive shifts in employment from the traded sector to the low-wage, low-productivity domestic service sector.


pages: 406 words: 105,602

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

Today, global communications means that new products can be conceived and built anywhere, and customers can discover them at an unprecedented pace. What’s more, individuals and small companies have unprecedented access to these new global systems, compared to a small number of owners of capital in the past. This setup flips Karl Marx’s old dictum on its head. What he called the means of production can now be rented. Entire global supply chains can be borrowed at little more than the marginal cost of the underlying products they produce. This dramatically lowers the initial capital costs required to try something new. In addition, the basis of competition is shifting. Today’s consumers have more choices and are more demanding. Technology trends reward businesses that have the broadest reach with near-monopoly-type power.

Once put into place, the system worked to prevent the kind of miscalculation and waste of resources that had previously occurred in the company. The structure that Alfred Sloan pioneered became the basis for all of twentieth-century general management. You can’t run a multiproduct, multidivision, multinational company and its attendant global supply chains without it. It is one of the true revolutionary ideas of the past one hundred years and is still widely in use today. Everyone knows the drill: beat your forecast, your stock goes up, you get promoted. Miss it and watch out. But when I first read this story, what went through my head was: You’re telling me that… once upon a time… people made forecasts… and they came true?

Why does it take so long to build this engine? I don’t want to undersell the technical challenges that led to the original five-year plan. The specifications required an audacious engineering effort that combined a difficult set of design parameters with the need for a new mass-production facility and global supply chain. A lot of brilliant people had done real, hard work to ensure that the plan was feasible and technically viable. But a large part of the technical difficulty of this project was driven by the specifications themselves. Remember that this product had to support five distinct uses in very different physical terrains (visualize how different the circumstances are at sea, in stationary drilling, on a train, for power generation, and in mobile fracking).


pages: 382 words: 107,150

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages by Annelise Orleck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, export processing zone, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, food desert, Food sovereignty, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, immigration reform, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McJob, means of production, new economy, payday loans, precariat, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor

“The answer is to keep on fighting,” Kalpona Akter insists. “If you are always worrying about dying, you can’t live.” Activists know that their struggles have also brought change: wage increases, hours reductions, enhanced maternity leave, and investigations of labor conditions in complicated global supply chains. The geographic scope and scale of the protests, the vast numbers of people involved, the militancy and the courage of the protesters have been stunning. Many of those rising are the poorest of the poor, willing to risk what little they have for the next generation. We are witnessing the first truly global uprisings since the 1980s “People Power” movements that toppled Duvalier in Haiti, Marcos in the Philippines, Ershad in Bangladesh, and Communist dictatorships across Central and Eastern Europe.

The women “cook and eat together; they drink and have music—mini concerts or dances.” They are lonely and isolated, far from family and friends in their villages, Sok says. Workers need community before they can stand up for themselves. Finally, drop-in centers teach workers to understand global supply chains, says Sok. “We show them, this is the profit of Puma, Adidas, Walmart. This is what CEOs earn in a year. We take workers to other countries when we can, to meet people who make clothes there for the same companies. We take them window shopping to see the clothes and shoes they make. They learn what those cost in stores overseas compared to how much they make for sewing each item.

See also living wage movement Food Justice certification, 246 Food Policy Councils, 248 food-service workers, 79 Foxx, Anthony, 243 Frattini, Massimo, 21, 24, 27–28, 35, 56 freedom fighters, 75 freedom schools, 59 Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTU), 149, 153–54 Friedman, Thomas, 71 Gallin, Dan, 97 Gandhi, Mahatma, 89–91 Gap (clothing manufacturer), 152, 253 Garcia, Vicky Carlos, 13, 227–28, 230, 232–35, 237 garment industry: environmental costs, 127; ethical apparel manufacturing, 249–50; globalization of, 123–27, 139; profits and earnings, 164–65; “run-away shops,” 129; response to worker demands, 37, 145, 153–56, 171–73, 175; use of migrant workers, 161. See also export-processing zones (EPZs); specific garment factories garment workers: achievements, 172–73, 251–52; bravery in face of state violence, 154–56, 171–73; as contract workers, 177; costs of living, 132–33, 150; educating about global supply chains, 164; exposure to toxic chemicals, 2, 146, 160, 165, 251 factory fires, 136–39; and fast-fashion production techniques, 128; forced labor, 128; Girl Effect campaign/foundation, 130–31; global vision, 174; hunger and mental illness among, 146; identifying manufacturers, challenges of, 149–50; labor laws and protections, 169–70; living wage rallies, 173; minimum wage increases, 172; New York strike, 1909, 38; organizing strategies and actions, 39–41, 53–54, 121–22, 139–40, 148, 154; production quotas, 131; protests organized against the Tuba Group, 142–45; risks faced by, 37; and union tradition, 169; working conditions, 39–40, 119, 126–28, 132, 134, 149, 166–68, 170.


pages: 236 words: 62,158

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

You disrespect the very city that works day and night so that we may drink this. This miracle. This tea. As I played through this stage of the game, it brought to mind all the different workers and processes that must have come together across the world to allow the player to enjoy “this miracle.” The videogame, like the cup of tea, requires complex global supply chains and different kinds of labor to ensure the final object can be consumed by the player. Uncovering these supply chains today will take more than just studying the lines of an evil monologue. The first encounter with Karl Marx in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate takes place in the packed Whitechapel train station, somewhere I used to pass through daily in modern, real-life London.

The production of videogames today involves “the highly disciplined and exploitative control of its cognitariat workforce—increasingly prominent in cognitive capitalism generally.”1 In these pages, we identified new ways companies manage and exploit workers in the games studio, but we also explored the essential global supply chains that mix both material and immaterial production. As Ian Williams has argued, the “exploitation in the video game industry provides a glimpse at how the rest of us may be working in years to come.”2 We discussed this kind of work through Notes from Below’s class composition framework, understood as “a material relation with three parts: the first is the organisation of labour power into a working class (technical composition); the second is the organisation of the working class into a class society (social composition); the third is the self-organisation of the working class into a force for class struggle (political composition).”3 This allowed us to unpack the organization of videogame work.


pages: 407 words: 113,198

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, food miles, Ford Model T, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hive mind, independent contractor, Internet Archive, invention of the wheel, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Kanban, low skilled workers, Mason jar, obamacare, off grid, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, supply-chain management, Toyota Production System, transatlantic slave trade, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

By 1998: Michael Power, “Evaluating the Audit Explosion,” Law and Policy 25, no. 3 (July 2003); Timothy Lytton and Lesley McAllister, “Oversight in Private Food Safety Auditing: Addressing Auditor Conflict of Interest,” Wisconsin Law Review, April 7, 2014. $50 billion-per-year bucket that is the for-profit auditing industry: “Auditing Working Conditions: Breaking Through the Conspiracy of Silence,” Ethical Trade Initiative, 2015; Genevieve LeBaron, Jane Lister, and Peter Dauvergne, “Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability Through the Ethical Audit Regime,” Globalizations 14, no. 6 (2017). five main export facilities for seafood processor Thai Union: Andy Hall to author. Top standards organizations are issuing certifications . . . but . . . “the auditors who certified them were experts in car batteries: Richard Stiler, “Third Party Audits: What the Food Industry Really Needs,” Food Safety Magazine, October 2009.

In the next audit, it needs to be 32 inches”—that was eventually resolved by hiring a former auditor as a consultant who recommended the factory “install two hooks and rotate the extinguisher back-and-forth.” Your private sector at work! Sonali Rammohan, “Toward a More Responsible Supply Chain: The HP Story,” Supply Chain Management Review, July 2009; Genevieve LeBaron, Jane Lister, and Peter Dauvergne, “Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability Through the Ethical Audit Regime,” Globalizations 14, no. 6 (2017). A date is set. Inspection questions previewed: As hinted in the text, the conflicts of interest here are truly impressive. The same auditing firm sent to evaluate the companies will also offer to help them prepare to ensure they will pass.

Joe Fassier, “Welcome to Certification Nation,” New Food Economy, October 29, 2015; Richard Stier, “Third Party Audits: What the Food Industry Really Needs,” Food Safety Magazine, October 2009. They cannot open locked doors: Genevieve LeBaron, Jane Lister, and Peter Dauvergne, “Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability through the Ethical Audit Regime,” Globalizations 14, no. 6 (2017). Retail brands often give auditing firms strict instructions: Ibid. they are duty bound to tell only you: Ibid. Factory managers in China can buy software: Kathy Chu, “A Look at How Some Chinese Factories Lie to Pass Audits,” China Labor Watch, April 30, 2012.


Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

They tried to make the argument that this endless creation of new office jobs is actually necessary—it’s all because with complex global supply chains, production has become so digitized and efficient that we need many times more people to manage it. So bullshit jobs they claimed were the equivalent of the boring alienating factory job of the 1940s or 1950s, but they are also equally necessary. Our wealth depends on them. To which the obvious reply is: well then why is it happening at universities? What’s the academic equivalent of global supply chains, containerized shipping, Japanese style “just in time” production quotas? It is not like education or teaching at universities has become all that more complicated than it was 50 years ago.


pages: 247 words: 68,918

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It’s essentially a catchall term for all the various processes by which ideas, information, people, money, goods, and services cross international borders at unprecedented speed. Together, these processes have created a much more integrated global economy through trade, foreign direct investment, large-scale capital flows, the construction of global supply chains, innovation in communications technologies, and mass migration. None of these individual elements is entirely new. Global trade has existed for centuries. But the multiplier effect these forces create and the velocity with which they move make this phenomenon qualitatively different from anything that has come before.

Some have predicted the rise of the “global citizen” as a challenge to the nation-state. The logic is simple: If you no longer depend for information on news sources broadcasting or publishing within one country, if you can quickly and easily form electronic social networks with people all over the world, if outsourcing and the advent of the global supply chain allow you to work for a company that is headquartered ten thousand miles from your home, if travel to foreign countries becomes ever easier and more affordable, and if more members of your family live and work elsewhere, won’t these globalization-generated changes weaken the ties that bind you to any one country?


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It’s the urban embodiment of an evolution from warehousing to distribution to logistics that took less than twenty years and saw it rise from a necessary evil to the front lines in an eternal war on costs and the competition. You can trace the shift in this thinking through title inflation, a local consultant explained. “When I started in the mid-eighties it was the ‘warehouse manager,’ ” he said. “Then it was the ‘assistant manager of logistics.’ Today, it’s the ‘SVP for global supply chain,’ and he might sit on the board of directors.” He or she likely sits on the boards of companies that decided they were better at logistics than anything else, such as Walmart, which achieves “everyday low prices” with a pythonlike squeeze on its suppliers. Everyone else, it seems, moved to Memphis or Louisville to let FedEx and UPS handle it for them.

No one has ever tried to run a $16 billion company on Skype calls, e-mail, and the occa-sional Paris rendezvous until now. The company calls this “worldsourcing.” “It’s about leveraging the best people, processes, and costs, no matter where they’re located,” says Gerry Smith, the American running its global supply chain from Singapore. “I have staff in Shenzhen, Raleigh, Baddi [India], and Brazil. I’m a lonely figure in Singapore. I’m here because I have the best airport in the world; we don’t need a brick-and-mortar headquarters to make decisions.” Neither does anyone else. Consultancies like McKinsey and Accenture have long since jettisoned theirs, and scores of multinationals act like they already have.

While Kasarda was still a student in 1968, he advanced the heretical idea that the size and reach of international trade and multinational firms had already surpassed the ability of any one nation to control them. The balance of power had been reversed; from now on, corporations would dictate the terms. Today, this is so patently true we have Tom Friedman’s “Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention,” which presupposes that no two countries with pieces of the same global supply chain—such as China, Taiwan, and Dell’s—will ever tempt economic suicide by warring. One of the main drivers behind the rise of multinationals and what Vernon called “globalism” was air travel, which “shrank the Atlantic crossing from four days to seven hours,” he wrote. “It turned transatlantic tourism from a rich man’s indulgence into a middle-class need.


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Just as it is possible to talk of win-win when things go well, it is also reasonable to see that it becomes a ‘lose-lose’ scenario when they do not. * The risks to the global economy in the event of a slowdown, correction or crash in China are obvious, given that China is ‘deeply embedded in global supply chains’, says the Bank of England report. There would be potential benefits – for example, a sharp reduction in some commodity prices like coal, steel and copper, as well as a fall in oil prices, leading to lower prices in the UK.129 Assessments like these presumably lie behind the aggressive stance on tariffs being adopted by the United States against China, with steps taken to put pressure on the economy to both weaken Beijing but strengthen consumers in the US at the same time.

There would be potential benefits – for example, a sharp reduction in some commodity prices like coal, steel and copper, as well as a fall in oil prices, leading to lower prices in the UK.129 Assessments like these presumably lie behind the aggressive stance on tariffs being adopted by the United States against China, with steps taken to put pressure on the economy to both weaken Beijing but strengthen consumers in the US at the same time. It also explains the robust attempt by China not only to issue economic countermeasures but to warn of the dangers of playing a game the consequences of which are hard to predict. The United States is ‘attacking the global supply chain’, said Ministry of Commerce spokesman Gao Feng, when asked about the introduction of yet more tariffs. ‘The American government is firing shots at the whole world and at itself too.’130 In Britain’s case, as the Bank of England’s report makes clear, the prospect of lower prices in the event of a major financial crisis in China is only one side of the story.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

Take one of the major North American producers of mobile phones that started with basic manufacturing in China but, realizing the potential, rapidly moved their Chinese operations up the value chain to include designing both hardware and software. The company now has over 3,000 research engineers working in China who design and develop products for the global marketplace. We were told how the company had initially invested in manufacturing as part of plans to expand its global supply chain, but when senior American executives realized there were many talented engineers, they rapidly moved into leading-edge R&D. A Chinese manager based in Beijing observed how they moved from “coding work” and “customization” to research “fundamental architecture development, so we’ve created a lot of IPR [intellectual property rights] here in China.”

These initiatives are intended to create a better system of checks and balances that recognizes the legitimate claims of all stakeholders—employees, managers, consumer, shareholders, and local communities—that must tackle the way companies excessively profit from the global auction at the expense of working families. There are other possibilities such as that proposed by Barry Lynn, where antitrust laws could be used so that no corporation controls more than a quarter of the American market. The sourcing of goods in the global supply chain could also be limited to only a quarter of products from any one country, which could lead to greater openness in the global economy with workers in many countries being able to gain from it.24 Justice: Beyond Human Capital A new bargain is also more than a matter of equalizing opportunities to join occupational elites even if, as we’ve argued, moving toward a level playing field in the competition for a livelihood is a key policy goal.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

David Lam, general partner at cross-border tech investment firm Atlantic Bridge, pointed out that any barrier is largely caused by politics. “Global supply chains are international, and the movement is unstoppable. It’s already happened. So it’s hard to turn back the clock. Some of the political leaders don’t necessarily share that view. They are the ones driving a lot of that policy and that does obviously create barriers, but they are more politically motivated than business motivated.” “Global supply chains are international, and the movement is unstoppable. It’s already happened. So it’s hard to turn back the clock.” David Lam General partner, Atlantic Bridge A US-China Venture Bridge Detours But the rifts are causing the bridge between Silicon Valley and China cross-border investing to be rerouted.


pages: 469 words: 132,438

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

One of the reasons that off-grid solar has taken off in East Africa is that tariffs and import duties there are relatively low, which enables Off-Grid Electric and other firms to import components of their solar systems from all over the world and move them freely between their bases of operation in Tanzania and Rwanda. In West Africa, by contrast, higher tariffs and duties make it more complicated and expensive to operate a global supply chain, ultimately raising the cost of off-grid solar. So a lesson for countries seeking to harness off-grid solar to improve domestic energy access is to tear down trade barriers that might artificially increase the cost of solar systems. Getting governments out of the way of innovation is a foundational requirement in order for public policy to enable off-grid solar deployment, but for the sector to flourish, it will need active support.

And the United States should reduce trade barriers, opting instead to foster a globalized solar industry. These steps might appear to help the competition. But this is a competition that plays to U.S. strengths. Indeed, in other innovation-led industries, such as semiconductor manufacturing, U.S. firms command global supply chains and invest liberally in the next technology generation. The United States is fully capable of transforming solar—from how it is financed, to what it looks like, to how flexible the system that it plugs into is—and enjoying the benefits of doing so. President Trump should rethink his administration’s priorities.

At the time of writing, the Trump administration was preparing to erect additional, sweeping trade barriers to imported silicon solar cells and panels from around the world, relying on the rarely invoked Section 201 of the 1974 Trade Act. But trade barriers are blunt, destructive tools that should be only a small component of America’s innovation strategy. Deployed recklessly, they can provoke trade wars that might stymie U.S. chances of taking the helm of an innovative industry with a global supply chain along which goods, services, and capital can flow efficiently across borders.51 Rather than retreating within its borders, America should embrace the chance to reshape the global solar industry in its innovative image. There are important differences between solar panels and semiconductors, and the business model of the latter may not translate exactly to the former.


pages: 592 words: 133,460

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

There was some life to be found on the ring road outside of town: some barbecue and big-box stores, a Hooters. Downtown, I walked for blocks without seeing a soul. The windows were boarded over with plywood that glowed orange in the twilight. The Cotton Club, where Buddy Holly’s band used to play, was shut. Lubbock cotton now flows into the global supply chain with an eerie silence: no celebration amongst a community—no matter how flawed and blind to suffering—to see it off. Skip Notes * U.S. agricultural workers are at higher risk of fatal injury than workers in any other industry in the United States, higher than mining, construction, warehousing.

* * * — In 2019 two Japanese brands, Muji and Uniqlo, came under fire for their ad campaign advertising the softness of the Xinjiang cotton in their flannel shirts. “What?! They’re actually using that as a slogan?!” fumed Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch. One Twitter user declared, “Many Uyghurs love and idolize Japan, but this is a betrayal.” The truth was, however, that Xinjiang cotton had spread so deeply in the global supply chain that there were few global brands that could have accurately claimed their clothes did not contain it. Xinjiang was by then the source of an estimated 20 percent of the world’s cotton. Because this cotton would be spun, knit, or sewn by an international web of producers, it was as likely to be present in a garment marked “Made in Vietnam” as in one marked “Made in China.”

With this data, the most productive employees could be made to work during the busiest hours, and unproductive salespeople would see their hours cut. The name was important, one executive said, “because it gave a personality to the system, so [employees] hate the system and not us.” * * * — The global supply chain that brings us our clothing can seem intimidatingly complex. But what if it isn’t? Clothing brands farm out the making of goods to whomever in the world can do it most cheaply, and then divorce themselves in the eyes of customers from the facts on the ground. That’s pretty simple. The complexity only comes in when brands really need it to: to prove how many layers removed they are from the human lives being touched—sometimes lost—as a direct result of their purchase orders.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Natasha, a Turo renter and Airbnb customer, summed up the rhetoric: “We’re putting money right in the pocket of the community we were visiting, skipping the middle man. So that felt good.” Participants in the nonprofits also saw their activities as an alternative to capitalism, especially those in the time bank. Across both types of sites our informants criticized global supply chains, corporate conformity, and exploitative and alienating social relations. We found an inchoate but powerful nostalgia, in which the sharing economy was envisioned as a household space, what we term a “domestic imaginary.”40 Production takes place within the home, social relations are familial, and the aesthetic is cozy.

I don’t feel like it really makes us happy and fulfills us in any way.” But it wasn’t only among time bankers that we heard these views. Food swappers think the food system is “insane.” Airbnb and Turo users talked about disliking chains and brand names. Respondents in multiple sites expressed their discomfort with global supply chains, sweatshops, and the environmental impacts of the consumer culture. Time banker Rachel believed that “we’re running out of resources and . . . it’s creating massive inequalities that are destabilizing our society and our democracy.” Why the Food Swap Failed: Snobbery and Social Exclusion Among our four sites the failure of the food swap was most spectacular.6 Why did things go awry for the well-meaning founders?


pages: 524 words: 155,947

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy by Philip Coggan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, Apollo 11, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Boeing 747, bond market vigilante , Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, Columbine, Corn Laws, cotton gin, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, driverless car, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global value chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, hydraulic fracturing, hydroponic farming, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Jon Ronson, Kenneth Arrow, Kula ring, labour market flexibility, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Blériot, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, M-Pesa, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Murano, Venice glass, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Phillips curve, popular capitalism, popular electronics, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, railway mania, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special drawing rights, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, TaskRabbit, techlash, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, V2 rocket, Veblen good, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, world market for maybe five computers, Yom Kippur War, you are the product, zero-sum game

When General Motors and Chrysler flirted with collapse in 2009, one of the reasons for a government rescue was that jobs were also at risk at the companies that supplied parts (such as tyres or headlights) to the industry.46 The Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association (MEMA) estimated that, as of 2018, more than 871,000 American jobs were linked to the creation of cars and trucks.47 Furthermore, these supply chains are international. While it is common to talk of the US or German car industries, these manufacturers depend on global supply chains. Parts may cross international borders many times before they are assembled into the finished product.48 Perhaps 30–50% of the trade in manufactured goods occurs within individual multinational companies.49 As they became aware of this, many developing countries slashed their tariffs so that they could become part of these global value chains.

In turn, this meant that manufacturing companies moved, since they no longer needed to rent expensive space in big cities in order to be near the docks. The result was a huge decline in blue-collar jobs in areas like Manhattan and east London. Without containerisation, it would be impossible to run the kind of global supply chains that multinationals operate. Indeed, it would also be impossible for companies to have low inventory levels; they can have minimal supplies of stocks because they know they can resupply themselves quickly. All this from the adoption of a humble metal box. Jet-setters If we could transport our great-great grandparents forward in time, what might surprise and alarm them most?

Several executives were arrested in a corruption crackdown in 2015–17.10 In its earliest growth phase, China concentrated on the low-value goods where its low wages gave it a clear competitive advantage. By 1990, it had become the world’s largest textile exporter.11 Later on, the country moved into electronics and became a key part of the global supply chain. By 2018, China was home to more than half of the world’s manufacturing capacity for electronics. Foxconn, which is Apple’s largest supplier, employs 250,000 people in Shenzhen alone.12 When Lenovo, the Chinese technology group, bought IBM’s personal computer business in 2004, it seemed a symbolic power shift from west to east.


The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance From Scratch by Thomas Thwaites

Anthropocene, carbon footprint, global supply chain, invisible hand, lateral thinking, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Guided by my (evidently misguided) belief that cheapness begets simplicity, I chose as my exemplar toaster the: Argos Value Range 2-Slice White Toaster Cat. # 421/9608 £3.94 — Which includes: • Coolwall • Variable browning control • Mid-cycle cancel • Cord storage — A great value toaster, which embodies the centuries of incremental technological development, rising material wealth, and diverse global supply chains on which modern life depends. A must for any well-appointed kitchen! It doesn’t have a crumb tray, though. Rule 2. I must make all the parts of my toaster starting from scratch. What does from scratch mean? From scratch means making something starting from the very beginning. What does starting from the very beginning mean?


pages: 282 words: 88,320

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

Once ensconced at LEGO, Knudstorp became a kind of at-large strategist who roved throughout the company, taking on different assignments as new challenges arose: collaborating with the management team of LEGOLAND to improve the theme parks’ performance, developing an action plan for building out the company’s nascent line of retail stores, deconstructing its global supply chain and recommending improvements. Acting on his belief that “relationships are just as important as results,” Knudstorp formed many critical ties across what was then a heavily compartmentalized organization. Within six months of arriving at LEGO, Knudstorp began reporting directly to the chief operating officer, Poul Plougmann.

As Knudstorp dug deeper into the LEGO Group’s malaise, he found the company’s problems were far more systemic than a falling U.S. currency and a failed Christmas. First and foremost, the company’s management team, which consisted of twelve senior vice presidents who oversaw six market regions as well as such traditional functions as the direct-to-consumer business and the global supply chain, was “highly dysfunctional,” recalled Knudstorp. “They didn’t work together. They operated in silos.” The chill from the executive suite often frosted the company’s retail partners, who regarded LEGO as aloof and largely uncaring. Knudstorp also found the company’s designers and developers chronically failed to grasp the business implications of their actions.


pages: 340 words: 90,674

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

China’s government responded with purges and the firing of officials it thought stood in the way.16 As prison numbers swelled, the Chinese government began building new camps with even stricter security measures and more imposing architecture, including guard towers, heavy concrete walls, and giant iron doors at the entrance, usually patrolled by police with well-trained attack dogs. The camps were completed in six months, as opposed to the many years needed to build prisons. Some camps ran their own factories where inmates were forced to toil on garments and shoes, infecting the global supply chain with slave labor. Most were big enough to hold ten thousand prisoners each, according to a BuzzFeed investigation.17 By October 2018, I was back in Istanbul to pursue the story. Turkey was home to tens of thousands of Uyghur and Kazakh refugees from China, as both the Uyghurs and Kazakhs were Turkic ethnic groups.

In 2018, three regions within Xinjiang forcefully transferred at least 570,000 people to do grueling cotton picking by hand for the bingtuan, Xinjiang’s paramilitary force.22 After the findings became public in December 2020, the United States banned cotton imports from the bingtuan, accusing it of “slave labor.”23 “The reported situation is of a scale, scope, and complexity that is unprecedented during the modern era of global supply chains,” the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a trade lobbying group consisting of leading clothing brands, announced in a statement with other industry groups, after the details of the labor transfers were made public. “Accepting the status quo is not an option.”24 [ ] In December 2017, the Communist Party began Becoming Family Week, a project that placed one million party cadres in Uyghur family households.


pages: 290 words: 90,057

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy by Lawrence Ingrassia

air freight, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, data science, fake news, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Hacker News, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork

This has dramatically lowered one of the main barriers to entry that long posed an obstacle to entrepreneurs and safeguarded the incumbents that had built their own factories and employed legions of deeply knowledgeable specialists on their R&D teams. Companies have outsourced production for decades, but in recent times, the global supply chain has become more diverse and sophisticated than ever. An abundance of potential manufacturing partners, many with excess capacity, can be found in Asia, the shop floor to the world. If anything, the challenge isn’t so much finding a supplier as it is sifting through dozens of possible suppliers to find the right one.

“It’s much easier than ever to rapidly build a new disruptive company, at least in the early stages, with limited capital,” notes Christopher Rogers, an analyst for Panjiva, which tracks import data and helps identify suppliers for an astonishing number of products, and puts it all online. Founded in 2005, Panjiva is part of an intricate network of companies devoted to every link in the global supply chain of goods. Information on suppliers that once was available only to big companies because it was buried in raw customs import data that was hard to access and decipher has now been democratized. “Smaller companies didn’t used to have market intelligence,” says Rogers. “Now they do.” * * * In times past, the biggest bazaars had hundreds of physical stalls offering their wares.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

The Fukushima accident, compounded by damage to other electric generating plants in the area, led to power shortages, forcing rolling blackouts that demonstrated the vulnerability of modern society to a sudden shortage of energy supply. The effects were not limited to one country. The loss of industrial production in Japan disrupted global supply chains, halting automobile and electronics production in North America and Europe, and hitting the global economy. The accident at Fukushima threw a great question mark over the “global nuclear renaissance,” which many had thought essential to help meet the power needs of a growing world economy.

American and European companies were setting up supply chains that gathered components from different parts of the world, assembled them in still other parts, and then packed the finished goods into containers and shipped them across oceans to customers anywhere in the world. Although China did not formally join the WTO until 2001, it had by then already become the linchpin in this new system of global supply chains. As factories went up all along the coastal region, the inscription “Made in China” became ubiquitous on all sorts of products shipped all over the world. China had now become what was said of Britain two centuries earlier—“the workshop of the world.” In due course, these new trade and investment linkages would have much greater impact on world energy than anyone might have imagined.

The huge earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011 killed more than 15,000 people, devastated a major part of the country, and set off a nuclear accident. It also took down the region’s power system, knocking out services, immobilizing communication and transportation, disrupting the economy and global supply chains, and paralyzing efforts to respond to the tragedy. In China, India, and other developing countries, chronic shortages of electric power demonstrate the costs of unreliability. The Internet and reliance on complex information-technology systems have created a whole new set of vulnerabilities for energy and electric power infrastructure around the world by creating entry paths for those who wish to disrupt those systems.


pages: 596 words: 163,682

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

More generally, even as they outsource the low-value-added manufacturing segments of the production chain, developed countries retain the high-value-added and profitable premanufacturing segments like R&D and the equally profitable post-manufacturing segments like marketing and finance.13 Such a division of labor is not unattractive to emerging markets that are trying to move up the complexity chain to build more technology-intensive products. Since the early 1990s, the possibility of participating in global supply chains has convinced a number of these countries to lower their tariffs, improve their business environment, sign treaties protecting foreign investment, and enhance their protection of intellectual property. This has eased the way for more segments of the value chain to be moved to emerging markets.

Initially, this has favored the highly educated and skilled in developed countries, much as has technological development. As emerging markets train their own people well (with students often finishing with an advanced degree from a developed country), capabilities are migrating to the rest of the world. The highly educated and skilled everywhere now compete for business from global supply chains. In some countries, their wage differential relative to others, while high, is plateauing or even falling.15 The losers are clearer: the moderately educated workers in developed countries. When the supply chain was entirely in the developed country, they benefited from the competitive edge that developed-country design or R&D gave them.

Also, to the extent that countries continue adhering to international agreements when the government changes—which will be the case if there are significant costs to domestic industry of withdrawing from commitments—it gives firms across the world predictability of tariffs over time, and thus a stronger incentive to invest. As we have seen, such a low tariff regime has proven so attractive that a number of emerging markets have lowered tariffs significantly so that their producers can become part of global supply chains. All this is to suggest that we should resist the populist nationalist turn to protectionism, and redouble our efforts to lower tariffs globally. The merits of cross-border flows other than those of goods and services are more uncertain and contingent on circumstances. As a series of financial crises have shown us, capital flows into a country are not an unmitigated blessing, especially if the flows are short-term in nature, and the country has poorly developed financial markets and institutions.


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

Their energy infrastructure is old, and energy and climate policy have made solar and wind power cost-competitive. As their coal power plants are nearing their end of life, and since energy use is stable, the deployment of solar and wind power in these countries is largely replacing their ageing energy infrastructure. Meanwhile, they are also taking advantage of global supply chains, whereby the import of consumable goods means there is less pressure placed on the energy system and emissions. Middle- and low-income countries have a different reality. Living standards are, at the aggregate level, considerably lower than in Europe and the US. To improve them, energy use is growing rapidly.

For some, this has brought the possibility of commuting long distances to work; for others, opportunities to undertake their education in a different country or go on holiday overseas. Technological advances in vehicles have also transformed trade: while international trade by sea has a long history, the things we consume today have complex global supply chains, and many of us are accustomed to having products arrive from a faraway origin sometimes just hours after we’ve ordered them. Yet for all the benefits that transport offers, it has significant and wide-ranging impacts on the environment. Extracting resources to make roads and railways, bikes and heavy goods vehicles, requires energy, generates pollution and often harms biodiversity.

There it was, an enormous dark green ship stuck in the desert, the word ‘EVERGREEN’ painted in gigantic white letters across the hull, while a lonely excavator chipped away at the vast shoreline. It was the perfect image for our modern world: the 400-metre-long vessel, leased by a Taiwanese shipping company and registered in Panama for tax reasons, which single-handedly brought global supply chains and large parts of the world’s trade to a one-week standstill. The Ever Given was on its way from China and Malaysia to the Netherlands, carrying some 18,000 containers filled with whatever stuff containers are filled with – electronics, household products, footwear, fast fashion, mountain bikes, outdoor furniture, barbecues, and so on.


pages: 382 words: 100,127

The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

There are now fewer than 2,000 factories employing more than 200 workers and about one third of manufacturing jobs are in foreign owned companies. Foreign ownership can be a great blessing—just think of Nissan in Sunderland—but foreign owned companies often have ‘ambitions limited by their role in global supply chains … and small UK manufacturers are routinely exposed to the sourcing decisions of overseas multinationals and the vagaries of economic decisions that are beyond their control,’ as the CRESC ‘Rebalancing’ paper referred to earlier puts it.48 Of course any modern economy has to be a relatively open one—consider how when the pound fell after the Brexit vote the FTSE100 share index rose because so many of those big companies’ earnings and assets are in dollars or Euros which are now more valuable in relation to sterling.

Meanwhile, the rapidity of industrial decline has created so-called ‘broken supply chains’, meaning even successful manufacturers have to source most of the product from elsewhere. JCB, often cited as a great British success story, has seen the British content of its diggers decline from almost 100 per cent in 1979 to about one third today. Similarly Dyson vacuum cleaners outsources everything except design. Global supply chains are a common feature of today’s global companies but according to CRESC British manufacturers import far more than their German counterparts.50 The Dyson effect can deliver dynamism, but only in a few pockets as British industry returns to a small workshop base last seen in the early stages of the industrial revolution—and such units are too small to combat weak export performance or high import penetration.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

By the time it arrived in Europe, it collided with a society made vulnerable by the horrific conditions wrought by feudalism—famine, poverty, slavery, and the roving armies of the Hundred Years’ War. Plague killed a staggering fifty million people, wiping out almost one-half of Europe’s population. Likewise, COVID-19 traversed the circuits of capital of the world economy, emanating from the major trading and travel hubs and passing through labor-intensive nodes in the global supply chain—warehouses, rail stations, air- and seaports, and the rest stops in between.18 Wuhan itself is often dubbed the Chicago of China because its airport, like bustling O’Hare, is a way station for so much domestic and international travel. The virus ripped across China in a few days, and within two months it was active in seventy-five countries.19 As the plague shows us, there have been pandemics across social systems; they’re not particular to capitalism.

In the meantime, in search of cheaper labor, many of the major domestic PPE producers, like 3M and Honeywell, outsourced their production to Asia. This meant that when we desperately needed PPE, we had to import it. More than any rich country in the world, we were suddenly hyper-reliant on a smooth and functioning global supply chain, which did not exist. China was the largest exporter, but its own stock was rapidly depleting, given that the outbreak happened there first. It also didn’t help that the Trump administration had started a trade war with that country not long before, fracturing international relations. The one major PPE producer that remained in the US, Halyard Health, developed technology to make 1.5 million N95s per day, ten times the going rate and seemingly enough to satisfy the predicted surge demand in the event of a US outbreak.24 But the Trump administration chose not to fund the project.


pages: 116 words: 32,712

Making a Killing: The Deadly Implications of the Counterfeit Drug Trade by Roger Bate

global supply chain, interchangeable parts, RFID, Sam Peltzman, supply-chain management

Many have begun to implement track-and-trace technology on their drugs to provide an effective “e-pedigree” to distributors and consumers. Some have experimented with using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to check the e-pedigrees of drug shipments, although, in the United States, this is not yet required by the FDA.101 To help secure the complex, vulnerable global supply chain, many drug companies have implemented their own security measures. Pfizer announced in December 2003 that all distributors in the United States selling its products would have to purchase them directly from the company or from selected wholesalers.102 In September 2006, Pfizer announced that it would cease selling drugs to eighteen wholesalers in the United Kingdom and instead distribute drugs there only through UniChem.103 These moves are attempts to cut down the size of the secondary wholesale market, which includes sales among wholesalers.104 Other pharmaceutical firms will need to secure their own supply chains and alert the public when they become aware of counterfeit drugs.


pages: 118 words: 35,663

Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing (Columbia Business School Publishing) by John E. Kelly Iii

AI winter, book value, call centre, carbon footprint, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, demand response, discovery of DNA, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of work, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Internet of things, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, natural language processing, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Feynman, smart grid, smart meter, speech recognition, TED Talk, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

VARIETY Over the past decade or so, computer scientists and mathematicians have become quite proficient at handling specific types of data by using specialized tools that do one thing very well. For example, a sales manager can employ data analytics software to reveal past sales trends and forecast future sales, using a specific tool for a specific data type. But that approach doesn’t work for complex operational challenges such as managing cities, global supply chains, or power grids, where many interdependencies exist and many different kinds of data have to be taken into consideration. What’s required is a holistic approach to data management and analysis. You have to be able to mash together different kinds of data and act on them with different kinds of tools.


pages: 427 words: 112,549

Freedom by Daniel Suarez

augmented reality, big-box store, British Empire, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, corporate personhood, digital map, game design, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Naomi Klein, new economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, private military company, RFID, Shenzhen special economic zone , special economic zone, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, the scientific method, young professional

"We also project reductions in export crops such as cotton in Asia and Russia. Security services in various countries are reporting labor unrest in both the agricultural and industrial sectors. The number of container ships being placed into warm and cold layup from lack of cargo is rising." It's tearing apart the global supply chain. Staring at the screen, The Major could visualize it like a full-scale nuclear attack. But one that the average person wouldn't notice--until it was beyond the tipping point. The British chap took over. "We project that if corn and soybean harvests drop another seven percent, raw material costs for almost all processed food products will skyrocket.

My family's been doing industrial farming for forty years and all it produces is debt, pollution, and water shortages. It ruins the land and the people on it." Ross nodded to the uniform fields out the window. "You think these other farmers will change?" "They'll have no choice. Gas is, what--eighteen bucks a gallon now? Industrial farming and the global supply chain gobble up fossil fuel." He peeled off each item with his fingers. "Natural gas in the fertilizers, petroleum-based pesticides, fuel for the tractors, more fuel for transport to food processors, fuel to process the raw crops into food additives, then to manufacture them into products, and then to transport the products across the country or world to be consumed--thirteen hundred miles on average."


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

‘But I’m not sure what will happen if I plug it into the mains.’ Eventually, he summoned up the courage to do so. Two seconds later, the toaster was toast. 2 Problem solving in a complicated world The modern world is mind-bogglingly complicated. Far simpler objects than a toaster involve global supply chains and the coordinated efforts of many individuals, scattered across the world. Many do not even know the final destination of their efforts. As a lumberjack fells a giant of the Canadian forest, he doesn’t know whether the tree he topples will make bed frames or pencils. At the vast Chuquicamata mine in Chile, a yellow truck the size of a house growls up an incline blasted into the landscape; the driver does not trouble himself to ask whether the copper ore he carries is destined for the wiring of a toaster or the casing of a bullet.

It’s probably a safe bet that cars would become more efficient, buildings would be built with more insulation and passive heating and cooling systems, and that we’d see more use of technologies such as nuclear, hydroelectric and even ‘carbon capture’ – preventing carbon dioxide emerging from a coal-fired power station. But what other changes we might see, who knows? Global supply chains might be reconfigured. Hundreds of millions of people might move to places where the climate or the geography allows a more energy-efficient lifestyle. Or world-saving ideas could emerge from even more unexpected sources. If there was some way to reduce the methane being belched out by cows and sheep – almost a tenth of the total contribution to greenhouse gas emissions – then that would be a huge achievement.


Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

South Korea, Brazil, and Turkey were the best examples of countries following such policies. In the 1990s, with the second globalization, things changed. What has become crucial for the success of developing countries is no longer to develop through various predetermined stages using their own economic policies, but to become part of the global supply chains organized by the center (the Global North). And moreover, not merely to go into higher value-added stages by copying what richer countries are doing, but, as China is doing now, to become technological leaders themselves. The second unbundling has made it possible to skip the stages that were earlier thought necessary.

As recently as the 1980s, it was unthinkable that countries that were overwhelmingly rural and poor, like India and China, would within two or three generations become technological leaders, or at least come close to the production possibility frontier in some areas. Thanks to their insertion into global supply chains, it became a reality. The way to interpret Asia’s success in the current era is not by seeing China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and so on as the latest versions of South Korea. They are the trailblazers of a new road to development which, through integrating one’s economy to the developed world, leapfrogs over several technological and institutional stages.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

But more often than not, large companies tend to use their clout to entrench their own dominance. Thanks to their wealth and global distribution, these companies have access to resources that remain out of reach for their smaller competitors. Large firms can use the offshore financial system to optimize their tax bills. They can leverage global supply chains and labor markets to lower costs. They can wage effective influence campaigns to win over policy makers. They can weather price wars, raise barriers to entry, and buy out would-be rivals before they get off the ground. They have access to larger data sets that they can use to optimize against smaller rivals.

Different cultures require different business strategies, different customer experiences, and different government relations. If companies do not learn how to do business in different cultural contexts, they will fail. Multinational companies must also develop something of an intelligence apparatus to help them see around the corner. In today’s global supply chains, civil unrest in southeast Asia could impact sales in North America and civil unrest in North America could impact sales in Europe. Effective geopolitical forecasting could make a significant difference to a company’s bottom line. At the same time, companies on the global stage now need to know how to defend themselves when it comes to cybersecurity.


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

Many developing countries also lack the ability—or have been told they don’t have the ability—to produce enough food, energy, and medicine to meet their own domestic demand. So, they rely on developed countries to supply them with imports of food, energy, and medicine. And, as we’ve discussed, they almost always need US dollars to pay for those crucial imports. As MMT economist Fadhel Kaboub has argued, this position at the bottom of global supply chains brings fundamental economic problems—many of them arising from the historical legacy of colonization itself.23 Exporting cheap labor and commodities, while importing expensive high-value items, tends to leave developing countries with perpetual trade deficits. The problem is that there isn’t a robust, permanent appetite for developing countries’ financial assets or real estate.

US Department of Labor, “Trade Adjustment Assistance for Workers” (webpage), www.doleta.gov/tradeact/. 15. Candy Woodall, “Harley-Davidson Workers Say Plant Closure after Tax Cut Is Like a Bad Dream,” USA Today, May 27, 2018, updated May 28, 2018, www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2018/05/27/harley-davidson-layoffs/647199002/. 16. Committee on Decent Work in Global Supply Chains, “Resolution and Conclusions Submitted for Adoption by the Conference,” International Labour Conference, ILO, 105th Session, Geneva, May–June 2016, www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_norm/---relconf/documents/meetingdocument/wcms_489115.pdf. 17. Office of the Historian, “Nixon and the End of the Bretton Woods System, 1971–1973,” Milestones: 1969–1976, history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/nixon-shock. 18.


pages: 357 words: 107,984

Trillion Dollar Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a President and a Pandemic---And Prevented Economic Disaster by Nick Timiraos

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bonfire of the Vanities, break the buck, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, fear index, financial innovation, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, implied volatility, income inequality, inflation targeting, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, moral hazard, non-fungible token, oil shock, Phillips curve, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Rishi Sunak, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, secular stagnation, Skype, social distancing, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, unorthodox policies, Y2K, yield curve

Powell imagined an increasingly likely scenario: desolate shopping malls, kids home from school early, the TV playing reruns of past NBA finals. This was looking less like Y2K—the classic example of the government over-preparing for a calamity that never materialized—and more like a significant and sustained shock to the economy. The Fed was facing two distinct economic problems. As workplaces shuttered and global supply chains became squeezed, the first was a jolt to the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services, or its supply side. Lower interest rates couldn’t do much about that. But the Fed could help alleviate the second problem, a demand shock, in which households and businesses hold off on spending or investment.

Rental-car companies, which had liquidated their idle fleets to pay debts during the lockdowns, suddenly needed more vehicles, sending used-car prices skyrocketing. Cargo ships idled outside ports, with containers piling up on the docks or in warehouses. Lumber prices spiked. It was a sign of the global supply chain in disarray. These and other commodities caused measures of inflation to jump, generating rumblings of discontent against the Fed and the administration’s stimulus policies. Powell sought to preempt worries about higher inflation and described them as transitory. First, prices had plunged early in the pandemic, so as those declines dropped out of the twelve-month rates of change, the year-over-year comparisons would jump, exaggerating actual pressures.


pages: 443 words: 112,800

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, American ideology, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bike sharing, borderless world, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, decarbonisation, deep learning, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, knowledge economy, manufacturing employment, marginal employment, Martin Wolf, Masdar, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, supply-chain management, systems thinking, tech billionaire, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

My comments were greeted with widespread skepticism and even derision. “Not in our lifetime” came the retort from the oil industry, as well as most geologists and economists. Shortly thereafter, the price of oil dramatically rose. When the price went over $70 per barrel in mid-2007, the price of products and services across the entire global supply chain began to rise as well, for the simple reason that virtually every commercial activity in our global economy is dependent on oil and other fossil fuel energies.5 We grow our food in petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. Most of our construction materials—cement, plastics, and so on—are made of fossil fuels, as are most of our pharmaceutical products.

Millions of people all over the world were more than happy to provide the goods and produce the services in return for our dollars. The global buying spree and the dramatic rise in aggregate output that accompanied it pushed up the demand for an ever-dwindling oil supply, resulting in a steep increase in prices on world markets. The sharp acceleration in the price of oil triggered price hikes across the global supply chain for everything from grain to gasoline, finally leading to a worldwide collapse of purchasing power when oil hit a record $147 per barrel in July 2008. Sixty days later, the banking community, awash in unpaid loans, shut off credit; the stock market crashed, and globalization came to a standstill.


pages: 453 words: 117,893

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

China is predicted to surpass even US R&D spending in the coming years. Of course, it’s not just what is spent or the number of patents filed that determines innovation. It’s how useful these inventions are. And that data does not yet exist for China. To complicate matters, much manufacturing now involves global supply chains. For instance, half of China’s exports are made by foreign-invested enterprises, so it’s multinational companies that are producing in China as well as domestic firms. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik estimated that the value of Chinese exports suggests that they come from a country with a much higher per capita income.

The statistics tell the story: in 2011 just 6 per cent of the population had access to a mobile device and only about 10 per cent had a bank account. Decades of military rule have left Myanmar underdeveloped and one of the poorest countries in Asia. But that also means that, with the right sorts of institutional reforms, it has significant potential to grow quickly. It sits in the world’s fastest-growing region with well-established global supply chains, which can help an economy industrialize and grow rapidly if it is part of the worldwide manufacturing network. Unlike many smaller countries in developing Asia, Myanmar, with a population similar in size to that of South Korea, can utilize a significant home market to promote growth as well as expand its exports.


pages: 374 words: 113,126

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

China is predicted to surpass even US R&D spending in the coming years. Of course, it’s not just what is spent or the number of patents filed that determines innovation. It’s how useful these inventions are. And that data does not yet exist for China. To complicate matters, much manufacturing now involves global supply chains. For instance, half of China’s exports are made by foreign-invested enterprises, so it’s multinational companies that are producing in China as well as domestic firms. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik estimated that the value of Chinese exports suggests that they come from a country with a much higher per capita income.

The statistics tell the story: in 2011 just 6 per cent of the population had access to a mobile device and only about 10 per cent had a bank account. Decades of military rule have left Myanmar underdeveloped and one of the poorest countries in Asia. But that also means that, with the right sorts of institutional reforms, it has significant potential to grow quickly. It sits in the world’s fastest-growing region with well-established global supply chains, which can help an economy industrialize and grow rapidly if it is part of the worldwide manufacturing network. Unlike many smaller countries in developing Asia, Myanmar, with a population similar in size to that of South Korea, can utilize a significant home market to promote growth as well as expand its exports.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Colonialism requires an infra structure that facilitates the movement of resources, and what makes the Cloud Empire colonial is the scale and scope of this worldwide network of extraction and distribution, which is managed through increasingly sophisticated logistics. And we should not forget the debt that the concept and sometimes the practice of logistics owes to the military spirit. The smooth movement of resources along global supply chains is a movement in which corporations and armies have often supported each other during colonial times. To be sure, Amazon does not require its own army, like the East India Company did. But as Deborah Cowen argues, logistics “[map] the form of contemporary imperialism,”7 and as Ned Rossiter points out, “Increasingly, logistics infrastructure is managed through computational systems of code and software,”8 that is, through data.

In another sense, the kinds of changes that—in the West, at least—neoliberalism advocated or celebrated (the “liberalization” of trade and markets, the emergence of global financial markets, and the huge growth of the personal finance sector) were among the practical preconditions for data colonialism.13 Indeed, the tools of data colonialism (such as Machine Learning) emerged in part as solutions to the practical challenges thrown up by the need, for example, to manage complex global supply chains and massively accelerating financial flows. Both contextualizations are, in our view, important. Whether we see the emergence of the Cloud Empire more in terms of continuities or as a decisive break from what preceded it, its strategic importance in capitalism’s history remains clear. The Cloud: From Metaphor to Episteme Today’s data empires are not necessarily interested in land, but they are interested—at least allegorically—in air.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Fearing that Chinese leaders would feel emboldened by perceived American military weakness, the United States sent two aircraft carriers to the region to engage in exercises with India, Japan, and Australia. In response to increased Chinese assertiveness, nations are taking steps to restructure global supply chains for critical technologies. India, Japan, and Australia launched a trilateral supply chain resilience initiative to reduce their dependence on China. As part of its economic stimulus, the Japanese government allocated $2.2 billion to incentivize companies to move production out of China. The French government began working with French pharmaceutical companies to re-shore production.

News & World Report, June 16, 2020, https://www.usnews.com/news/world-report/articles/2020-06-16/dozens-killed-as-india-china-face-off-in-first-deadly-clash-in-decades. 76dismantle Hong Kong’s freedoms: Laignee Barron, “How Beijing’s National Security Crackdown Transformed Hong Kong in a Single Month,” Time, August 4, 2020, https://time.com/5874901/hong-kong-national-security-law-timeline/. 76incursions across the midline of the Taiwan Strait: Sara Zheng, “Fighter Jets Cross a Line in Taiwan Strait, Says Taipei as It Hosts US Health Official Amid Rising US-China Tension,” South China Morning Post, August 10, 2020, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3096776/fighter-jets-cross-line-taiwan-strait-says-taipei-it-hosts-us; “Taiwan Scrambles Fighters as Chinese Jets Again Fly Near Island,” Reuters, September 19, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/19/taiwan-scrambles-fighters-as-chinese-jets-again-fly-near-island.html; Brad Lendon, “Almost 40 Chinese warplanes Breach Taiwan Strait Median Line; Taiwan President Calls It a ‘Threat of Force,’” CNN, September 21, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/21/asia/taiwan-china-warplanes-median-line-intl-hnk-scli/index.html. 76United States sent two aircraft carriers to the region: Sanjeev Miglani, “U.S. Holds Naval Exercises with Allies in Asia amid China Tension,” Reuters, July 21, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-usa/u-s-holds-naval-exercises-with-allies-in-asia-amid-china-tension-idUSKCN24M0RB. 76restructure global supply chains: Katrin Hille, “US and Taiwan to Work on Reshaping Supply Chains Away from China,” Financial Times, September 4, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/64be66cd-91eb-4862-a8fe-7c998b2e4770. 76trilateral supply chain resilience initiative: Dipanjan Roy Chaudhurhy, “India-Japan-Australia Decide to Launch Resilient Supply Chain Initiative in the Indo-Pacific Region,” Economic Times, September 2, 2020, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/foreign-trade/india-japan-australia-decide-to-launch-resilient-supply-chain-initiative-in-the-indo-pacific-region/articleshow/77870346.cms. 76$2.2 billion to incentivize companies: David Arase, “Tokyo Prods Japanese Firms to Leave China,” interview by Mercy A.

Hikvision is a socially-responsible company. Our mission is to keep people, organizations, and property safe and secure. We are proud that our company is trusted in Europe and we will continue to invest in Europe’s security. We are confident in our business continuity plan that ensures the sustainability of our global supply chain and we have the capability to continuously provide quality products to our valued partners and customers in Europe.” (“Hikvision Europe’s statement regarding the U.S. Commerce Department’s decision,” Hikvision, n.d., https://www.hikvision.com/europe/newsroom/latest-news/2019/hikvision-europe-s-statement-regarding-the-u-s--commerce-departm/.)


pages: 138 words: 43,748

Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle by Jeff Flake

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, cognitive dissonance, crony capitalism, David Brooks, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, immigration reform, impulse control, invisible hand, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Potemkin village, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, uranium enrichment, zero-sum game

The solution to our problems was to erect physical barriers between us and the world as well as metaphorical barriers between Americans, as populists will do. Our multilateral trade deals were suddenly the worst deals in the history of mankind, and other countries were benefiting and we had been left holding the bag—when in truth, all of the countries engaged in trade were doing better. Efficient and truly global supply chains mean that the component parts of an “American” car sometimes cross four or five borders—or our own borders four or five times—before that car rolls off the assembly line. Specialization, modernization, and mechanization mean a better standard of living for everyone and make for a more peaceful world as well.


Paint Your Town Red by Matthew Brown

banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, fear of failure, financial exclusion, G4S, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, housing crisis, hydroponic farming, lockdown, low interest rates, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, new economy, Northern Rock, precariat, remote working, rewilding, too big to fail, wage slave, working-age population, zero-sum game

In the UK, too, where local authorities have broken from the status quo in favour of ambitious local experiments, they are gaining success at the ballot box. In the 2019 general election, Preston was one of the few constituencies to buck the national swing that saw heavy losses for Labour in its former heartlands. Recently, and most obviously, the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed the extent of our reliance both on complex and overextended global supply chains and on the poorest and least valued workers in the cleaning, health, transport and care work sectors to keep the economy and society going. Jobs in these sectors, despite their vital importance, tend to be insecure and poorly paid, and are dominated by young, female, BAME and migrant workers.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

Since this is the period that also saw the rise of finance capitalism, it might be best to return to the FIRE sector (finance, insurance, real estate) to seek insight into what overall dynamic in the economy sparked such changes. If those whom the Economist believes to be administering complex global supply chains are not, in fact, administering complex global supply chains, then what exactly are they doing? And does what is happening in those offices provide any sort of window on what is happening elsewhere? why the financial industry might be considered a paradigm for bullshit job creation • expedited frictionless convergences • coordinated interactive market institutions • contracted virtual clearinghouses • directed margin adjustments 21 On a superficial level, of course, the immediate mechanisms that create bullshit jobs in the FIRE sector are the same ones that produce them anywhere else.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

The city’s industrial base relocated to the neighbouring PRD region for cost reasons. The new access to a large workforce in growing cities such as Shenzhen and Guangzhou meant that Hong Kong was able to manage and finance a huge number of manufacturing joint ventures. Hong Kong capital flooded into the regional subcontracting market that became essential to global supply chains of consumer goods. Hong Kong benefited greatly from growth on the mainland, which resulted in many newly listed mainland companies listing on the HKSE, a huge rise in Chinese tourism, a very large deposit base of RMB and a soaring domestic export market (Fung, 2008, 2011). It is no exaggeration to say that Hong Kong played a decisive role in the ­transformation of the Chinese economy.

National frameworks that outline an inclusive vision of urbanisation and create predictability around long‐term public infrastructure priorities and funding streams appear to offer benefits for both world cities and other cities. This kind of multi‐cycle approach allows cities to understand how they should compete in global supply chains and complement the most globally oriented cities. Even in federal systems, the national tier still has responsibility to co‐ ordinate with state and local partners to create lasting policy and identify viable funding mechanisms. Taking a longer view, the kind of tensions and disparities that are emerging between world cities and the other cities and rural areas in the nation state are 238 World Cities and Nation States only just beginning.


pages: 160 words: 45,516

Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future by Richard Susskind

business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disruptive innovation, global supply chain, information retrieval, invention of the wheel, power law, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, supply-chain management, telepresence, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Thus, for a particular deal or dispute, a few if not many sources might contribute to the final product. To achieve this, we may find it useful to apply production-line or manufacturing mentality and methodology to the delivery of legal services: using, for example, just-in-time logistics and global supply chain techniques (underpinned by IT). On this model, one individual organization—a law firm or perhaps a new-look legal business—will likely take over all responsibility for the delivery of the completed, multi-sourced service (as a main contractor will do in a building project). I am emphatically not advocating some kind of mass production model for legal service.


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

Technology could fix all that, they argued, by stretching existing resources to deal with the first two problems and ratcheting down the excesses of industrial growth to deal with the third. If we replicated the logistics systems of global business and applied them to the very local problems of cities, it seemed, all would be well. As Colin Harrison, one of the architects of IBM’s smart-cities strategy explained it, “For much of the last twenty years, we instrumented the global supply chain. That hasn’t happened in city governments.”32 Remodeling cities in the image of multinational corporations requires three new layers of technology according to Arup, a global engineering giant. The first layer is “instrumentation”—the sensor grids embedded in infrastructure that measure conditions throughout the city, much as companies use GPS trackers, bar codes, and cash-register receipts to measure what is going on in their businesses.

His bio lauded many achievements, including leading the development of the first commercially useful MRI system in 1978, but also his “many failed innovations,” including an intriguing one named “magnetic bubble memories.”25 For Harrison, the weaving of SABRE-like information systems into everything was an inevitable historical process. “Over the last two decades,” he explained in 2011 at a conference in New York, “the planet became wired for transactions. The global supply chains that existed for centuries suddenly became instrumented,” fitted out with sensors that could track the movement of people, goods, and money. Manufacturers could track operations and sales worldwide, in real time. Suddenly, suppliers could tap into their customers’ mainframes to update delivery schedules.


pages: 459 words: 138,689

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

Bruce Masse (London: Geological Society, Special Publications, 2007), 273, 271–78, http://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/specpubgsl/273/1/271.full.pdf. 10. Jason Hickel, The Divide: A New History of Global Inequality (London: William Heinemann, 2017), 275, 285. 11. Walmart, “Walmart on Track to Reduce 1 Billion Metric Tons of Emissions from Global Supply Chains by 2030,” 8 May 2019, https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2019/05/08/walmart-on-track-to-reduce-1-billion-metric-tons-of-emissions-from-global-supply-chains-by-2030. 12. Mary Schlangenstein, “Airline Shares Reach Record as Buffett’s Berkshire Extends Bet,” Bloomberg News, 15 February 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-15/airlines-rise-to-a-record-as-buffett-s-berkshire-deepens-bet. 13.


pages: 561 words: 138,158

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

Nor did China put itself in quarantine or constructively advocate for movement restrictions.4 The WHO condoned that position, arguing against unnecessary travel bans.5 On all sides February 2020 delivered a staggering demonstration of the collective inability of the global elite to grasp what it would actually mean to govern the deeply globalized and interconnected world they have created. * * * — Among those who had immediate reason to take the virus seriously were those who manage global supply chains. At the time of the SARS crisis, China had accounted for only 4 percent of the world economy. In 2020, its world share was closer to 20 percent. For a manufacturing sector like automobiles, China was both the largest market and the largest production hub. In 2019, 80 percent of car production around the world involved Chinese parts.6 As one carmaker noted: “Everyone sources from China.”

Mai, “China Postpones Year’s Biggest Political Gathering Amid Coronavirus Outbreak,” South China Morning Post, February 17, 2020. 53. R. McMurrow, K. Hille, and N. Liu, “Coronavirus Hits Return to Work at Apple’s Biggest iPhone Plant,” Financial Times, February 18, 2020. 54. T. Ng, Z. Xin, and F. Tang, “Help China’s Key Manufacturers Plug Back Into Global Supply Chain, Xi Jinping Says,” South China Morning Post, February 21, 2020. 55. D. Yi and H. Shujing, “Foxconn Allows Henan Workers to Return to Its Zhengzhou Complex,” Caixin, February 21, 2020. 56. Y. Ruiyang and L. Yutong, “China’s Roads to Be Toll-Free Until Epidemic Ends,” Caixin, February 17, 2020. 57.


Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin

algorithmic management, Apple Newton, asset allocation, autism spectrum disorder, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy

“Apple realized the same thing we knew about Nokia and Motorola and all the others, which is that they were too successful and focused on feature phones (without e-mail and Web capability). They weren’t betting on the future,” says Lazaridis. “They were betting on their engine—their low-cost, high-volume, global supply chain juggernaut. They were missing the point. There will be no feature phones in the future. It will all be smart phones.” Long before the iPhone was even a rumor, Lazaridis was back to work creating the 3G Bold with a dramatically enhanced screen and the media-handling capabilities of an iPod.


pages: 1,072 words: 237,186

How to Survive a Pandemic by Michael Greger, M.D., FACLM

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Anthropocene, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, double helix, Edward Jenner, friendly fire, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Helicobacter pylori, inventory management, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, New Journalism, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, supply-chain management, the medium is the message, Westphalian system, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zoonotic diseases

We live in a global, just-in-time economy, which allows manufacturers worldwide to streamline their production to precisely meet demand, thereby reducing inventory warehousing costs and waste. The problem is that a single glitch in the supply chain can almost instantly dry up supply. During a crisis in which we shut down our borders, globalized supply chains will be shattered and vital goods like pharmaceuticals in general will be in short supply or unavailable.661 Antibiotics only work against bacteria. Although they can be effective in treating secondary bacterial infections, they are useless against viral pneumonia. Antibiotics were useful during the 1957 and 1968 pandemics because these were essentially just bad flu seasons when more people than expected came down with the flu due to the novelty of the bird/human hybrid viruses.

There are fewer than a hundred thousand full-feature ventilators in all of America’s hospitals,691 and most are already in use at any given time for everyday medical care year round.692 Experts like Irwin Redlener, then director of Columbia University’s National Center for Disaster Preparedness, saw the ventilator shortage as being emblematic of the country’s overall lack of preparedness. “This is a life-or-death issue, and it reflects everything else that’s wrong about our pandemic planning,” Redlener said.693 Within days of a pandemic, ventilators will be just one of many pieces of medical equipment that would be in short supply with the collapse of global supply chains. “Throughout the crisis,” Osterholm wrote in the public policy journal Foreign Affairs, “many of these necessities would simply be unavailable for most health-care institutions.”694 With COVID-19, we’re seeing a desperate lack of even basic protective gear for health-care workers, such as masks and gowns.

The AMA duty-to-care clause has since been removed.712 According to the journal of the American Bar Association, though, thirty-two state governments have considered legislation that would effectively force health-care workers to show up for work in a medical crisis by threatening to yank their licensure.713 Population Bust A Category 5 pandemic today could be many times worse than the pandemic of 1918, the world’s greatest medical catastrophe. In 1918 we were, as a nation and as a people, much more self-sufficient.714 Now, with the corporate triumph of free trade, just-in-time inventory management and global supply chains characterize all major economies and business sectors.715 Economic analysts predict a pandemic would cause a global economic collapse unprecedented in modern history.716 With the world’s population at an historical high, this could lead to unprecedented human suffering, something the global community is getting a taste of due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

This reflects a fundamental shift in relations between the two parties. Until fairly recently, the design, manufacture, and marketing of consumer products generally occurred within the confines of one company. But since the 1970s they have been delinked. And, as sociologist Richard P. Appelbaum has argued, in contemporary global supply chains it is retailers and branders (designers and marketers that depend on others for manufacturing) who have the most power to establish the arrangements and terms of production, not factory owners. Factory giantism serves their interests.33 Early in the history of factory production, some of the most successful manufacturers established their dominance by selling their products under brand names and controlling distribution networks.

., China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance, English edition edited by Zhongjin Li and Eli Friedman (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 11, 201–03; Jennifer Baichwal, Manufactured Landscapes (Foundry Films and National Film Board of Canada, 2006). 8.David Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City,” New York Times, Dec. 24, 2004; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 102. 9.New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997, Mar. 28, 2000; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 173; Richard P. Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational Contractors in East Asia: Emergent Trends in Global Supply Chains,” Competition & Change 12 (Mar. 2008), 74; “About PCG,” http://www.pouchen.com/index.php/en/about/locations, and “Yue Yuen Announces Audited Results for the Year 2015,” http://www.yueyuen.com/index.php/en/news-pr/1147-2016-03-23-yue-yuen-announces-audited-results-for-the-year-2015 (both accessed June 3, 2016); International Trade Union Confederation, 2012 Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights—Vietnam, June 6, 2012, http://www.refworld.org/docid/4fd889193.html. 10.Some ten thousand Soviet technicians were posted to China to help with the industrialization drive, while nearly three times that many Chinese went to the Soviet Union for training.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Setting up the fully equipped lab costs around $50,000.10 There are now over 70 Fab Labs, most in urban areas in highly industrialized countries, but many, surprisingly enough, are in developing countries where access to the fabricating tools and equipment creates a beachhead for establishing a 3D printing community.11 In remote areas of the world, unconnected to the global supply chain, being able to fabricate even simple tools and objects can greatly improve economic welfare. The great majority of Fab Labs are community-led projects managed by universities and nonprofit associations, although a few commercial retailers are beginning to explore the idea of attaching Fab Labs to their stores—so that a hobbyist can buy the supplies he or she needs and then use the Fab Lab to create the product.12 The idea, says Gershenfeld, is to provide the tools and materials anyone would need to build whatever they can envision.

“Wohlers Associates Publishes 2012 Report on Additive Manufacturing and 3-D Printing: Industry Study Shows Annual Growth of Nearly 30%,” Wohlers Associates, May 15, 2012, http://wohlersassociates.com/press56.htm (accessed August 16, 2013). 4. Richardson and Haylock, “Designer/Maker.” 5. Irene Chapple, “Dickerson: Etsy Is Disrupting Global Supply Chains,” CNN, June 5, 2013, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/05/business/etsy-leweb-craft-disrupting (accessed June 28, 2013). 6. “A Brief History of 3D Printing,” T. Rowe Price, December 2011, http://individual.troweprice .com/staticFiles/Retail/Shared/PDFs/3-D_Printing_Infographic_FINAL.pdf (accessed November 2, 2013). 7.


Spies, Lies, and Algorithms by Amy B. Zegart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, air gap, airport security, Apollo 13, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Chelsea Manning, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, failed state, feminist movement, framing effect, fundamental attribution error, Gene Kranz, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, index card, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, job automation, John Markoff, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Network effects, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, operational security, Parler "social media", post-truth, power law, principal–agent problem, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, uber lyft, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Now they can attack privately owned critical infrastructure like power grids and financial systems in cyberspace—anytime, from anywhere, without crossing a border or firing a shot. In the twentieth century, economics and security politics were separate spheres because the Soviet-bloc command economies were never part of the global trading order. In the twenty-first century, economics and security politics have become tightly intertwined because of global supply chains and dramatic advances in dual-use technologies like AI that offer game-changing commercial and military applications. Until now, intelligence agencies focused on understanding foreign governments and terrorist groups. Today they also have to understand American tech giants and startups—and how malign actors can use our own inventions against us.

The 2019 threat assessment issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned that the United States “faces a complex global foreign threat environment” and that technological advances are enabling more states and non-state actors to steal information “to the detriment of U.S. interests.”22 The 2016 National Counterintelligence Strategy noted that global supply chains and communications have made information and assets essential to American national security more distributed and vulnerable. At the same time, hostile intelligence services have more tools at their disposal for stealing and exploiting sensitive data.23 Defensive and Offensive Counterintelligence Counterintelligence can be divided roughly into two sets of activities: defensive or passive counterintelligence, which consists chiefly of security measures, and offensive counterintelligence, which involves infiltrating a hostile intelligence service to understand how it operates and thwart its activities through disruption and deception.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

What steam did in the nineteenth century, aeroplanes, supertankers and mechanised ports did for the last third of the twentieth century. The explosion of communications technology in the twenty-first century is enabling Western companies to do precisely the same in the knowledge economy today. Companies’ ability to go offshore via diversified global supply chains is no longer confined to physical goods. In the short term it is not artificial intelligence the West should worry about. It is what Baldwin calls remote intelligence. In some respects it has already arrived. Over the last twenty years, India and the Philippines reaped the rewards of the telecoms revolution to create lower-skilled service sector jobs at call centres, and on technology helpdesks.


pages: 204 words: 58,565

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, Jinho Kim

behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, business intelligence, business process, call centre, computer age, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, forensic accounting, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, hypertext link, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, margin call, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Myron Scholes, Netflix Prize, p-value, performance metric, publish or perish, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Shiller, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, six sigma, Skype, statistical model, supply-chain management, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport

Analytical Thinking Example: Demand Forecasting at Cisco Forecasting customer demand is a problem for many firms, particularly in manufacturing.9 It is a particularly important issue for Cisco Systems, the market-leading provider of telecommunications equipment. The company has a very complex global supply chain, and doesn’t manufacture most of the products it sells. As Kevin Harrington, vice president of global business operations in Cisco’s Customer Value Chain Management organization put it: “Forecasting customer demand is, of course, a central part of supply chain management and a critical enabler of lean manufacturing.


pages: 254 words: 61,387

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

This matters. As an industry report notes: “Collection is not recycling. A product is not recycled until it is made into another product.” Since modern recycling began, China has bought most of America’s recyclables. Millions of tons of it were shipped across the Pacific and reintegrated into the global supply chain. American cities and waste facilities sold recycling by the cargo load to China at a profit. Everybody won. But those days appear to be over thanks to the messiness of America’s single-stream recycling. In 2018, China raised its standards for the recycling it would buy. According to the new rules, only 0.5 percent of it can end up in landfill.


pages: 247 words: 60,543

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

The US dollar is involved in around 9 in 10 FX trades (compared with around 1 in 25 for China’s renminbi), and BIS figures show that non-US banks hold some $12 trillion in dollar assets (of which China accounts for a trillion) that must be funded with dollar liabilities. The US dollar’s dominance as a transaction currency has serious implications (Sandbu 2020). One of them is that global trade, in a globalized world of global supply chains, is held back by a strong US dollar. These long supply chains, constructed to deliver efficiency within industries, have significant financing requirements for importers and exporters. It appears this often takes the form of dollar lending to companies outside the United States who transact in dollars.


Uncontrolled Spread by Scott Gottlieb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, fear of failure, global pandemic, global supply chain, Kevin Roose, lab leak, Larry Ellison, lockdown, medical residency, Nate Silver, randomized controlled trial, social distancing, stem cell, sugar pill, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

In that hearing, I told the Senate that “China’s chemical industry, which accounts for 40 percent of global chemical industry revenue, provides a large number of ingredients for drug products. It’s these starting materials—where in many cases China is the exclusive source of the chemical ingredients used for the manufacture of a drug product—that create choke points in the global supply chain for critical medicines.”14 When it came to testing, the shortages of key components would persist for months. In July, a survey conducted by the Association of Public Health Laboratories found that 20 percent of public health labs would run out of at least one item required to do their tests within a week without steady resupply.15 In the case of testing systems, the low-margin components that went into shortage were the reagents used to run the tests, and the swabs used to collect samples.

Going forward, extending an approach to public health preparedness that views these risks through a lens of national security protection also means building more resilience into our public health infrastructure. It means expanding our healthcare system’s capacity to deal with a crisis, particularly our ability to conduct massive diagnostic testing and to implement large-scale manufacturing of biologicals. It also means reexamining the global supply chain that has left us vulnerable to shortages when every country that we depend on was suddenly hoarding the same equipment. It means we need a no-regrets ethos when it comes to pandemic preparedness. There must be no repentances or recriminations if we overinvest in preparedness when a new pathogen emerges only to see the virus fizzle out rather than explode into the next pandemic.24 Finally, it means bringing back to the US more of the manufacturing of critical healthcare components and finished goods.


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

Business leaders and policymakers need to ask: What do we have that others do not have? And how can we turn that unique advantage into a source of growth and wealth for all our people? China has clearly done this with proactive industrial policy that supports their entrepreneurs and economy across manufacturing and consumer Internet services. China strategically used the global supply chain and their own domestic market to amplify their comparative advantage and bootstrap their economic growth. The combination of industrial policy, public sector investment, and entrepreneurial energy is what many other countries will also look to replicate from China’s success. I see the beginnings of this in India with the creation of the new digital ecosystem known as IndiaStack.


pages: 204 words: 66,619

Think Like an Engineer: Use Systematic Thinking to Solve Everyday Challenges & Unlock the Inherent Values in Them by Mushtak Al-Atabi

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business climate, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, corporate social responsibility, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, follow your passion, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, invention of the wheel, iterative process, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, mirror neurons, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, remote working, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking

This well-written book provides coverage of a number of important issues and techniques not commonly covered in most introductory engineering textbooks. It would benefit both engineers and non-engineers to read it as it may help them solve problems or develop opportunities in the real world.” Mastura Mansor, Vice President-Global Supply Chain, Scomi “The challenges of the 21st century will require a whole new kind of engineer: engineers who can both design complex technical systems and appreciate their interaction with society; engineers who possess both analytical intelligence and emotional intelligence; engineers who can work with others, take risks, and learn from failure.


pages: 234 words: 63,149

Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World by Ian Bremmer

airport security, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, clean water, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, global rebalancing, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, Parag Khanna, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, trade route, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Strife within so many important countries could inflict considerable damage on the global economy, with dire consequences for volatile and vulnerable states like Pakistan, which relies on Saudi, U.S., and Chinese help to keep its government afloat. Globalization faces a fundamental setback as global supply chains become unmanageable and a lot more borders appear within states. Local actors refuse to respect agreements signed at the national level that exploit their resources. In some cases, they seize assets and property owned by the state (pipelines, reservoirs, ports) or by companies based beyond their borders.


pages: 252 words: 70,424

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

This is clearly a big issue for Target and other retailers struggling to protect their reputations, but it is most often addressed by looking at the best practices of best-in-class retailers or financial companies to understand how they prevent security breaches. Natural Producers would look at the problem at a higher level, namely, how does the structure of the global credit card system compromise security and is there a global change that could improve it? In the same way that Walmart is influencing the environmental footprint of its global supply chain, could Target change the security footprint of retail payments? In this way, companies shift their organizational focus from day-to-day minutiae to the larger purpose of what the organization is about and what foundational solutions it can offer. Questions at this level of scale are rarely posed at all, much less at all levels in corporate environments—another example of the ways that many large businesses constrain the collective imaginations of their employees.


pages: 233 words: 64,702

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business by Edward Tse

3D printing, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, bilateral investment treaty, business process, capital controls, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, experimental economics, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, middle-income trap, money market fund, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, reshoring, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, wealth creators, working-age population

Born in Yichang, a city on the Yangtze in central China, after graduating from Wuhan University in 1983 he moved to the United States, where he became a business-school professor at the University of Texas. Yu went on to launch an airlines-related computer systems business that he eventually sold to Andersen Consulting (the forerunner of Accenture) and worked as a multinational executive running Amazon’s and Dell’s global supply chains. His job at Dell took him back to China, with a post in Shanghai managing the company’s $18 billion procurement budget. For most people, that would have been challenge enough. But Yu found himself caught up in the tide of entrepreneurial fever that was sweeping the country. The idea for Yihaodian emerged from a business lunch with fellow Dell executive—and current Yihaodian CEO—Liu Junling.


pages: 281 words: 69,107

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order by Bruno Maçães

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Admiral Zheng, autonomous vehicles, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, cloud computing, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Donald Trump, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, global value chain, high-speed rail, industrial cluster, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, liberal world order, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, one-China policy, Pearl River Delta, public intellectual, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, trade liberalization, trade route, zero-sum game

It was always like that, as you will be told in Beijing. The difference is that now someone else is inching closer to the center. The Belt and Road is the name for a global order infused with Chinese political principles and placing China at its heart. In economic terms this means that China will be organizing and leading an increasing share of global supply chains, reserving for itself the most valuable segments of production and creating strong links of collaboration and infrastructure with other countries, whose main role in the system will be to occupy lower value segments. Politically, Beijing hopes to put in place the same kind of feedback mechanism that the West has benefited from: deeper links of investment, infrastructure and trade can be used as leverage to shape relations with other countries even more in its favor.


pages: 232 words: 63,803

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food by Chase Purdy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Big Tech, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Donald Trump, gig economy, global supply chain, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs

Feria started her career at General Mills, literally making brownies and Cheerios, brands that sell in virtually every US supermarket. Then she went to the Procter & Gamble Company, where she worked in consumer goods. This was also about the time she became vegan. She operates her investing from the perspective that animals need to be removed from global supply chains. Whether that means growing leather from cells, funding start-ups that create non-animal-based gelatin, or pumping money into a cell-cultured meat start-up, Feria knows that interest from investors will be crucial if these start-ups ever want a shot at challenging the multibillion-dollar status quo.


pages: 777 words: 186,993

Imagining India by Nandan Nilekani

"World Economic Forum" Davos, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Airbus A320, BRICs, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, distributed generation, electricity market, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, flag carrier, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, light touch regulation, LNG terminal, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, Parag Khanna, pension reform, Potemkin village, price mechanism, public intellectual, race to the bottom, rent control, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, smart grid, special economic zone, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Abhijit Banerjee remarked to me how villagers have begun to oversee public road works in their areas. “Old men will sit by the side of the road, watching the contractors,” he says, “and if they mess up on the tarring and levelling, they make them fix it.” In the long term, world markets also have the power to improve governance standards. The integration across industry sectors with global supply chains has brought in international scrutiny and standards for local businesses, such as in food safety laws. It is also driving governments to respond to supply chain inefficiencies, which are bringing in reforms in agriculture, port and highway infrastructure, and a push toward less draconian controls in manufacturing.

For instance, a villager without access to a good government school is able to access either a rural private school or education provided by a long-distance tutor through one of Sriram Raghavan’s IT kiosks. Group-based entitlements—in education, employment and infrastructure—are also becoming less difficult to sustain as the private sector expands and the country links itself with global supply chains in infrastructure and labor. Dr. Madhav Chavan, cofounder and director of the NGO Pratham, tells me, “Workers in Bombay are refusing to join unions on minimum wage, since they can negotiate directly with a company and get jobs at higher incomes.” This is creating broader support for markets and economic reforms and is also slowly bringing down the strength of interest groups such as teachers unions in schools and of unionized employees in the public sector.


pages: 816 words: 191,889

The Long Game: China's Grand Strategy to Displace American Order by Rush Doshi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American ideology, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, energy security, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, George Floyd, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Malacca Straits, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, positional goods, post-truth, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, special drawing rights, special economic zone, TikTok, trade liberalization, transaction costs, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, zero-sum game

And since 2016, Beijing has launched several similar and heavily resourced programs, including a plan to become a world leader in AI by 2030, a plan to dominate standard-setting by 2035, and a plan to invest $1.4 trillion in five years to build 5G networks across China.73 Third, Chinese sources see their role in supply chains as an enormous advantage worth preserving as technology competition intensifies. Even as countries around the world sought to diversify away from China following COVID-19, President Xi declared that protecting China’s role in global supply chains was one of his top national priorities. These chains are one reason some scholars like Jin Canrong argue that “China has a greater chance of winning” the Fourth Industrial Revolution.74 Although the United States does have “the best innovation capabilities,” he argues, the country now “has a major problem, which is the hollowing out of its industrial base.”75 This means it “cannot turn technology into a product acceptable to the market” without China’s factories.

“China has just about every industry” and its “manufacturing industry will account for more than 50 percent of the world’s total by 2030.”76 The country’s superior numbers of engineers, its ability to reverse-engineer, and its factories’ centrality to global technology are “China’s real advantage in long-term industrial competition.”77 China should press this advantage. “Regardless of how the United States feels,” he argues, “China . . . must work hard to seize the Fourth Industrial Revolution” and become the “leader” of it.78 For now, China is retaining its hold on global supply chains despite foreign pressure. The European Chamber of Commerce in China found that only about 11 percent of its members were considering relocation out of China in 2020; similarly, the president of AmCham China noted that the majority of the group’s members are not planning on exiting China.79 For these firms, the rationale goes beyond cost alone.


pages: 652 words: 172,428

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

Some of these nations enjoyed geographical advantages that made it easier to keep the virus at bay, but they generally had one other thing in common: they had experience mishandling recent epidemics, pandemics, or other national disasters, and had learned their lessons. The coronavirus caused the worst economic downturn in modern times, and it also nearly triggered a massive financial crisis in the United States—averted only because of a timely and overwhelming response by the U.S. Federal Reserve. The pandemic exposed the vulnerability of global supply chains as countries experienced shortages of critical medical supplies and other goods. It tore at the fabric of the European Union—a coalition of twenty-seven countries supported by shared economic, social, and security concerns—as national border closings and the scramble for medical supplies unraveled its common purpose and raised questions about its very survival.

It was no surprise, therefore, when French president Macron continued to emphasize the importance of Europe moving toward greater “strategic autonomy” even after Biden won the U.S. election.21 PREPARING FOR THE NEXT PANDEMIC Each year, between two and five new zoonotic viruses are discovered that have jumped from animals to humans.22 As the world grows more urban, as deforestation further displaces animals from their natural habitat, and with meat very much a part of global supply chains, the chances of another major pandemic will only accelerate.23 In the years ahead, shifting climatic zones will also force animals out of their habitats and into greater contact with people (thus increasing the risk of zoonotic diseases) and expand the range of mosquitoes and other sources of vector-borne infectious diseases.


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

The chocolate factory is a giant shed, a blank oblong with a series of slightly higher blank oblongs jutting out of it. Most new factories are monochrome but the Mondelez factory is two-tone – grey and another, darker grey. It is digital-neat, as if it hadn’t so much been built as computer-rendered onto the bright white snow. On either side are other industrial sheds, nodes in the global supply chain: a distribution centre for the Portuguese food company Jerónimo Martins, an air filter plant built by the Minneapolis firm Donaldson and a car-seat maker, Johnson Controls, based in Wisconsin. There’s a set of turnstiles in the fence around the factory but nobody stopped me going through. A sign promoted a kind of managerial cult called Integrated Lean 6 Sigma, designed to reduce defects on the production line.


pages: 183 words: 17,571

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, disintermediation, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, underbanked, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

That would aid other developing markets that depend on low-cost labor to compete internationally, and it would raise the cost of Chinese goods to United States consumers considerably, so Americans would learn to do without their 72-inch TVs in many instances. That does not mean that the “jobs” supposedly “shipped” to China would return to high-cost, high-tax, and high-regulation localities in the United States.The development of global supply chains, “lean manufacturing,” and offshore production are responses to increased global competition and technologies that change factor costs while shrinking time and distance. Even doubling the value of the RMB in dollar terms would change none of that. On the other hand, removing Chinese savings and reserves from the global financial economy could be catastrophic.


pages: 290 words: 76,216

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed by Robert Skidelsky

additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive bias, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, George Akerlof, George Santayana, global supply chain, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, happiness index / gross national happiness, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, precariat, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

These outcomes can serve as indicators of what will happen in the real world without the need for further interrogation. Network analysis studies economic networks, which are ‘webs’ whose nodes represent economic agents (individuals, firms, consumers, organisations, industries, countries, etc.) and whose links depict market interactions. This is useful for studying the rise of networks in the global supply chain. The most important networks today are programmed computer networks. System dynamics, derived from Forrester’s (1971) attempts to model the world ecosystem, take a similar approach but focus on links between aggregate variables rather than agents. These can be economic variables such as GNP or capital stock, but could also refer to physical quantities such as forested areas or oil stocks, which has made this technique particularly popular in ecological economics.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

See Matthew Finkin, ‘Beclouded work, beclouded workers in historical per- spective’ (2016) 37(3) Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal 603; Susan Kitchell, ‘Tonya, the Japanese wholesalers: why their domination position’ (1995) 15(1) Journal of Macromarketing 21; J Lautner, Altbabylonische Personenmiete und Erntarbeiterverträge (1936) 164. 16. Select Committee on Homework, Reports of the Select Committee on Homework (HC 290-IV, 1907–8), xxv. The parallels are by no means limited to history: think, for example, of twentieth-century outsourcing and global supply chains. 17. Arun Sundararajan, The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism (MIT Press 2016), 159–75. * * * Notes 167 18. Consider, for example, this dizzying description of clothing manufacture: [T]he middleman fixes the garment, and passes it on to the tailor or ‘maker’ to baste for fitting; from this it passes to the ‘machiner’ to machine the main seams; again back to the fixer to fix the shoulder seams, collars and sleeves; back again to the tailor to put in the stitching; and a last to the whom to fell in the lining and stitch buttons and buttonholes.


pages: 261 words: 74,471

Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies by Charles de Ganahl Koch

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, big-box store, book value, British Empire, business process, commoditize, creative destruction, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income per capita, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, oil shale / tar sands, personalized medicine, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Solyndra, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing

Both businesses are using digital media and advanced analytic tools—which lower the cost of distributing information and help turn it into knowledge—to create more value for their customers and end users. Another transformative use of this new technology is a focus by all our businesses on the Internet of Things, which greatly increases connectivity—not only within the business and Koch, but across our global supply chains. In GP this includes experiments such as the “washroom of the future.” All our businesses use the Internet to improve the safety and reliability of our manufacturing plants. The ability of a business—any business—to transform itself through information technology requires several elements: Recognition by the business leaders that they, not the company’s internal IT group, own the vision, strategy, and implementation for the transformation.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

I have asked the Rabbi to put together a deck and walk the team through his views for the upcoming year. He loves having the spotlight. He even dressed up for this. He turns to his summary slide. It tells us that the global economy is flat-lining. The Big D’s trade war with China, while now resolved, still has the global supply chain heaving. Data has stabilized in the USA, but globally, it’s fragile; global GDP growth is the lowest since the GFC. Only 10% of the world is in expansion and world trade actually declined last year. That rarely happens. In the USA, industrial production is down, the third straight year-over-year decline.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

Comparative advantage is another unintuitive concept, yet specialisation on the basis of comparative advantage and trade can deliver large mutual benefits (as well as always-destabilising disruption). Specialisation and exchange, either domestic or international, are the source of the transformative economic growth of the past quarter millennium. They are the drivers of the global supply chains now under attack for reasons of national advantage or resilience during a crisis. Common sense finds it equally hard to accept that jobs have no objective existence in the economy separate from the people who currently do them (the ‘lump of labour fallacy’), or that it can be a good thing for the economy’s growth rate if some businesses are allowed to fail.


pages: 342 words: 72,927

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet? by Pete Dyson, Rory Sutherland

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 747, BRICs, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive load, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, demand response, Diane Coyle, digital map, driverless car, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, functional fixedness, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Greta Thunberg, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high-speed rail, hive mind, Hyperloop, Induced demand, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low cost airline, Lyft, megaproject, meta-analysis, Network effects, nudge unit, Ocado, overview effect, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Rory Sutherland, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, selection bias, Skype, smart transportation, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Veblen good, When a measure becomes a target, yield management, zero-sum game

UK business travel has been stagnant for the past ten years according to Department for Transport statistics. But one thing hasn’t changed: across the world, emissions from transport are growing faster than those from any other sector.31 We cannot yet know exactly how all this will affect transport planning. Uncertainty over economic performance and global supply chains is affecting both travel demand and travel supply through disruption to energy, fuel, construction, car manufacture and distribution. Hybrid working might be evenly spread across the week, but if everyone takes advantage of work-from-home Fridays and sticks to the same start and finish times, transport will suffer continued peak-time demand troubles.


pages: 305 words: 79,303

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

Iconic brand consistency is achieved by key design elements: glass—a glass pane, a cube, or cylinder as an entry, often a clear glass staircase, patented by Jobs; open space, minimal interiors, no inventory in store (products are brought out to purchase). The 492 stores, dropped into exclusive shopping districts in eighteen countries, draw more than 1 million worshippers every day.33 The Magic Kingdom only drew 20.5 million people total in 2015.34 Apple also runs a global supply chain. The components stream in, from Chinese mines, Japanese studios, and American chip fabs, to contractors’ immense manufacturing plants and settlements in multiple nations (notably, and notoriously, China), and then on to Apple stores, both brick and mortar and online. Meanwhile, the billions in earnings from the sale of these products follow their own circuitous routes back to a network of tax havens, including Ireland.


pages: 329 words: 85,471

The Locavore's Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers, Hiroko Shimizu

air freight, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, food miles, Food sovereignty, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, intermodal, invention of agriculture, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, megacity, moral hazard, mortgage debt, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, refrigerator car, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl

Globally-imported ingenious agricultural heritage systems Glaeser, Edward Global food supply chain history of human body transformations and initiatives for local Globalization critics of of food supply chain Globally-imported ingenious agricultural heritage systems (GIAHS) Gould, David Government food purchasing intervention leaders managed food and food security run reserves Gráda, Cormac Ó Grades (food) Graff, Gordon Grain(table) Battle for Grain ( ) government-purchased producing states reserves Grapes Great grandmother Great Leap Forward Greater Toronto Green cities Green peas, ripening periods Greenbelt Greenhouse gas emissions air freight consumer behavior and production transportation seasonality and storage transportation mode load Gros Michel bananas Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Haiti Han China Hardy, Thomas Harrison, Harry Harte, William Hawaii Hayes, Peter Health Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act Height nutrition and Herbal remedies Herbert, Claude-Jacques High-yield agriculture History, of food agriculture global supply chain of government intervention local food initiatives meatpacking Hitier, Henri Hobby gardening Hobson, John Atkinson Hoefner, Ferd Holden, Patrick Homogecene Hongerwinter 1944–1945 Hoover, Herbert Horse Association of America Howe, Frederic Clemson Huber, Peter W. Human body agribusiness and changing evolution of Human intellect Hundred Years War Hunger See also Famine; Food shortage Hunter, William Wilson Hurst, Blake Hybridization Imperfections Imports rice urbanization and India Initiatives, local food economic depression and history of support wartime(photo) Inner cities Innovation Integrated Regional Information Networks Intermediaries Invasive species Invisible hand Irish potato famine Jacks, Graham Vernon Jacobs, Jane Japan famine in World War II and Jefferson, Lorian P.


pages: 303 words: 81,071

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

Which had been the root of huge frustration and anxiety for Simon; Rush had seen it eating him up, the usually unfazed and endlessly enthusiastic figure reduced to pacing the bridge during the day, moping in his office at night. It was, of course, the main reason for this whole elaborate mission, for the last four months they’d spent risking their lives at sea: to take a container ship halfway around the world and back up the global supply chain. It wasn’t the first time Simon had done it—he’d taken the Dymaxion up the chain at least once a year, to Rush’s knowledge—but it was the first time he’d done it since the crash. The first time he’d done it since global capitalism had collapsed, since the vast data networks that managed the ships and ports had vanished, and since the algorithms that decided what you wanted to buy and then brought it halfway around the globe from a Chinese sweatshop to the shelves of your local store had burned in the data fires along with the rest of the digital age.


pages: 307 words: 87,373

The Last Job: The Bad Grandpas and the Hatton Garden Heist by Dan Bilefsky

Boris Johnson, Crossrail, Etonian, gentrification, global supply chain, license plate recognition, urban sprawl, young professional

They decided it was better to hide at least part of it and then lie low, or at least as low as was humanly possible, given their somewhat understandable pride in their accomplishment. Tiny and easily concealed, diamonds have long been coveted by thieves seeking to move cash without being traced. Sew a ten-carat £1 million ($1.5 million) into a pair of underwear, fly out of the country, and the gem could quickly vanish into a global supply chain of millions of diamonds that extends from Hatton Garden to New York and Tel Aviv. The gang’s stash contained millions of dollars in both uncut and polished diamonds, leaving them with a few options. The uncut diamonds could be smuggled out of Britain and sent to cutting centers in Gujarat, Tel Aviv, or New York, where characteristics such as weight and size could be transformed out of all recognition.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

They have integrated tech into their organizations at a world-beating pace, making them more competitive and thus producing better wages for their employees. Economists sometimes speak of CEOs as arbitrary beneficiaries of a variable called “skill-biased technical change.” That phrase refers to new technologies that boost the return to skilled labor. For instance, email and smartphones allow for easier management of global supply chains at a distance, and that in turn increases the influence and eventually the compensation of many of the best managers in multinational enterprises. But skill-biased technical change does not fall from the sky; rather, it comes about because it was the vision, deeply held and tenaciously enacted, of a number of CEOs.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

And even after all those hours knitting, she is constantly sketching new designs or trading e-mail messages with 50 or more customers a day.34 I spoke with Maria Thomas, the former CEO of Etsy. She agrees that the promise of Etsy was to encourage “local living economies,” but she also noted the critical role of the global supply chain for most of the small businesses to be successful. Knitting scarves is possible because the wool might be grown on sheep in Lubbock, Texas, but shipped to China for processing and dye, and then shipped back to New York to be sold in a store.35 But even so, the rise of crafting requires businesses to stay small.


pages: 262 words: 83,548

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

In a world of triple-digit oil prices, distance costs money, pure and simple. Connecting cheap labor in Asia with rich consumers in North America makes all kinds of economic sense when oil is $20 a barrel. But when oil prices escalate, it’s less profitable to ship most goods across the Pacific. Changes in transport costs are radically rerouting global supply chains, bringing many of them much closer to home. Hauling iron ore from Brazil to feed Chinese steel factories and then shipping the finished product back across the Pacific to North America isn’t economically viable when oil prices are trading in the triple-digit range. Instead, we could see iron ore from Labrador loaded on trains and shipped to factories in Rust Belt cities such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland or Hamilton, Ontario.


pages: 308 words: 84,713

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

“March of the Machines,” 60 Minutes, CBS, January 13, 2013, cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57563618/are-robots-hurting-job-growth/. 26.Bernard Condon and Paul Wiseman, “Recession, Tech Kill Middle-Class Jobs,” AP, January 23, 2013, bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-impact-recession-tech-kill-middle-class-jobs. 27.Paul Wiseman and Bernard Condon, “Will Smart Machines Create a World without Work?,” AP, January 25, 2013, bigstory.ap.org/article/will-smart-machines-create-world-without-work. 28.Michael Spence, “Technology and the Unemployment Challenge,” Project Syndicate, January 15, 2013, project-syndicate.org/commentary/global-supply-chains-on-the-move-by-michael-spence. 29.See Timothy Aeppel, “Man vs. Machine, a Jobless Recovery,” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2012. 30.Quoted in Thomas B. Edsall, “The Hollowing Out,” Campaign Stops (blog), New York Times, July 8, 2012, campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/the-future-of-joblessness/. 31.See Lawrence V.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

She tinkered with the robot for a little bit, looking at the directions and fiddling with the wiring and turning the switch on and off a few times. “It’s not working,” she said finally. “Why not?” I asked. She could have just told me that the motor was broken, but my mother believed in complete explanations. She told me that the motor was broken, and then she also explained global supply chains and assembly lines and reminded me that I knew how factories worked because I liked to watch the videos on Sesame Street featuring huge industrial machines making packages of crayons. “Things can go wrong when you make things,” she explained. “Something went wrong when they made this motor, and it ended up in your kit anyway, and now we’re going to get one that works.”


The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

This was truly a grim and horrific stage of global capitalism. The cruelty that accompanied the development of the modern world economy must not be forgotten, because that cruelty shows up in other ways today; human trafficking is one of the greatest examples, which also continues in the form of bonded labor and child labor as part of global supply chains. Humanity is not done with the horrific abuse of others in pursuit of greed and profit. Feeding Europe’s Factories: Cotton The British and Dutch East India companies may rightly be considered the first corporations of modern capitalism. As profit-driven and greed-based joint-stock companies, they set the tone and behavior for what was to come.


pages: 263 words: 80,594

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation by Grace Blakeley

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, decarbonisation, democratizing finance, Donald Trump, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, fixed income, full employment, G4S, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job polarisation, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, pensions crisis, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-war consensus, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transfer pricing, universal basic income, Winter of Discontent, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

But it would take a national crisis for the remnants of the post-war order finally to fall. The Political Consequences of Social Democracy Just as Bretton Woods was collapsing, the social democratic model was starting to show signs of strain.17 Bretton Woods created a global economy, with global corporations, global supply chains, and global competition. Eventually, the system became a victim of its own success. Some companies — notably the US multinationals — thrived, but many others found it harder and harder to compete with the rising industries located in Germany, China, and Japan. UK corporations in particular found themselves struggling to benefit from the new wave of globalisation, partly because sterling was pegged to the dollar at too high a level, making British exports more expensive to international consumers.18 These firms struggled to cope with increasing international competition, and by the end of the 1960s, their profits had been seriously reduced.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

They buy steel from a steel company, leather from a leather company, seats from a seat company, speedometers from a speedometer company, and so on. All those Camrys and F-150 pickup trucks zipping past you on the highway contain parts provided by hundreds, maybe thousands, of major suppliers. Those suppliers in turn draw from hundreds or even thousands of smaller part makers along the global supply chain. As industries mature, so do their supply chains, allowing many companies to specialize in parts of the process, making the entire industry more efficient and productive. Until recently, the software industry had no such thing. Most software companies—think of companies like Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP—pretty much wrote all of their own software end to end.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

“From social media to the global economy to supply chains,” Maughan explained, “our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all.”18 These systems are designed to speed up transactions and interactions in service of efficiency, but, in the process, we have given up a lot of democratic power over them, even as we have failed to equip those systems with “an ability to make ethical decisions and moral judgments.”19 The stock market, where automation has increased both the speed and quantity of trades, is an example of this, but the best one is the system of logistics and global supply chains that has been built out over the past fifty years. After World War II, the increasing use of standardized containers began to transform the shipping industry, reducing the cost and time of shipping, as well as the power of dock-workers. But the technology did not transform everything on its own.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

If there’s really not enough work to go around and there are so many extra people to employ, we can always farm in shifts. Those with a penchant for global conquest can still work overtime and become legendary by solving the real problems of our society: topsoil depletion, global warming, slave populations, and energy production, to name just a few. They can track the entire global supply chain of the products everyone is using and root out the parts that place an unfair labor burden upon certain people. (A low-cost smartphone that requires workers to dig for rare metals in dangerous mines is not a low-cost smartphone.) Some of these problems will be mitigated simply by taking our emphasis off this relentless quest to employ more people the old way.


Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System by Alexander Betts, Paul Collier

Alvin Roth, anti-communist, centre right, charter city, corporate social responsibility, Donald Trump, failed state, Filter Bubble, global supply chain, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Kibera, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, open borders, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rising living standards, risk/return, school choice, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, trade route, urban planning, zero-sum game

In November 2015 we ourselves went public with the idea, with an article aimed at both the public-policy and business communities in the influential American policy journal Foreign Affairs. In January 2016 at Davos, the forum for global business, Queen Rania acclimatized CEOs to the idea that corporate social responsibility to refugees did not mean diverting some profits into sending blankets, it meant putting their core skills to use by integrating refugees into global supply chains. In the context of emerging business interest in solutions to the refugee crisis, a range of manufacturing company CEOs began to take notice. The formal launch of the pilot project came as part of the London pledging conference on Syrian refugees on 4 February 2016. There, both David Cameron and King Abdullah spoke about the pilot, as did CEOs, including, for example, Andy Clarke, CEO of Asda, the UK subsidiary of Walmart.


pages: 363 words: 94,139

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

Explaining that Jony had no interest in the business side of Apple—just as he had hated the business side at Tangerine—the designer concluded, “He just wants to focus on ID.” “All I’ve ever wanted to do is design and make; it’s what I love doing,” Jony told one interviewer. “It’s great if you can find what you love to do. Finding it is one thing but then to be able to practise that and be preoccupied with that is another.”7 As the master of Apple’s global supply chain, Tim Cook was, in fact, much the logical successor. In just thirteen years, Cook had constructed a complex apparatus that allowed the company to build superb gadgets—albeit of Jony’s design—at unparalleled speed, volume, efficiency and profitability. Cook might not possess Jobs’s charisma, but he was a logistics titan who had been effectively running the company ever since Jobs had gone on his most recent medical leave.


pages: 309 words: 95,495

Foolproof: Why Safety Can Be Dangerous and How Danger Makes Us Safe by Greg Ip

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Air France Flight 447, air freight, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Boeing 747, book value, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, double helix, endowment effect, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global supply chain, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, savings glut, scientific management, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, value at risk, William Langewiesche, zero-sum game

Science is relatively unequivocal that climate change should intensify hurricanes, worsen droughts and fires, and increase periods of intense rainfall. And as global temperatures have risen, so has the economic toll of record-breaking environmental catastrophes, from Katrina and Sandy in America to devastating wildfires in Australia in 2009 and the floods that crippled Thailand and disrupted global supply chains in the fall of 2011. But climate change could not explain Sandy’s destructive toll. After all, it wasn’t even a hurricane by the time it came ashore, having been downgraded to a “post-tropical cyclone.” The principal reason for Sandy’s devastating impact is that millions of productive, affluent people live and work in a place that is inherently dangerous.


pages: 351 words: 93,982

Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies by Otto Scharmer, Katrin Kaufer

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Fractional reserve banking, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, technology bubble, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, working poor, Zipcar

The ratio of work to nature is much higher than in the case of the apple that we harvest in our backyard. What gets lost in translation throughout this journey to a global division of labor is meaning. Meaning emerges from seeing one’s own connection and contribution to the whole. But being underpaid in Asia as I assemble a product for the global supply chain of, say, the iPad—what meaning and purpose can I derive from that? Very little. Today’s challenge of reinventing labor does not concern only the issues of jobs and living wages. It also concerns the issue of meaning, that is, of relinking work (jobs) with Work (passion and purpose). THE JOURNEY FROM 0.0 TO 3.0 As depicted in table 3, the role of work and labor has changed profoundly throughout history.


pages: 344 words: 93,858

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

It is legendary for its efficient—some would say ruthless—efforts to get the lowest price possible for its customers. To that end, it has adeptly used technology, managerial innovation, and, perhaps most significantly, low-cost manufacturers. Walmart imports about $27 billion worth of goods from China each year. The vast majority of its foreign suppliers are there. Walmart’s global supply chain is really a China supply chain. China has also pursued a distinctly open trade and investment policy. For this among many reasons, it is not the new Japan. Beijing has not adopted the Japanese (or South Korean) path of development, which was an export-led strategy that kept the domestic market and society closed.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

—Cassandra Bissell, my date to the 1996 Amherst Central High School prom, December 20, 2013, as posted on Facebook It is one of the great unremarked ironies that Bowling Alone was released within months of another best seller, Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree.1 Now considered a quintessential exploration of “globalization,” the New York Times columnist’s turn-of-the-twenty-first-century exposé shined a spotlight on how new information technology, global supply chains, and huge multinational corporations have integrated Americans into a new post-Cold War economic system. Though no one has seemed to notice, Friedman’s observation cut right at the heart of Putnam’s central argument. If Bowling Alone was arguing that Americans were becoming more isolated, The Lexus and the Olive Tree contended that we were actually becoming more globally connected.


pages: 534 words: 15,752

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy by Sasha Issenberg

air freight, Akira Okazaki, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, flag carrier, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, haute cuisine, means of production, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, telemarketer, trade route, urban renewal

At each stage, players get more information about the product they own, all while diminishing its life span through further exposure to air—a delicate juggle of swapping knowledge of its worth for the ability to realize some of that value. With sushi, unlike technology or clothing or most things moved along global supply chains, the product can never sell itself. Freshness demands more. Due to nature’s fiat, every piece is different and bears no trail of ownership; by the time the actual quality of a cut of fish is known, it is sitting on somebody’s tongue, usually with a touch of soy sauce—too late for anyone to reassess its price.


pages: 334 words: 93,162

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

Stop growing so much coca, and we’ ll stop snorting it. But both sides miss—or ignore—a crucial fact: Americans’ involvement in the international drug market extends well beyond our appetite to get high. For decades and for a variety of reasons, the United States has been an important link in the global supply chain, protecting and often funding major drug-running organizations. The government has denied it for just as long. Anyone who believes it is labeled a conspiracy nut. And the American media, Webb discovered the hard way, can tie itself in knots trying to avoid discussing it. In the forties, Americans may well have fought a “good war,” but that doesn’t mean we waged it like angels.


There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

But it is a wish list of the stuff that I think every one of us needs to cultivate as best we can. (1) Big picture perspective. Since the problems we face are now global, our thinking needs to be global. In this book we have seen time and again how almost everything we buy and do requires a global supply chain and sends ripples around the world. We need to tune into this even though we rarely see any of it with our own eyes. We have also seen how the global system dynamics often ensure that small scale positive actions in one place are undone elsewhere unless the global perspective is properly understood. (2) Global empathy.


pages: 317 words: 98,745

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

But ingenuity in cyberspace is as bountiful and unpredictable as the individuals who go online, and for the newly connected digital natives of the global South and East operating an email scam or writing code for botnets, viruses, and malware represents an opportunity for economic advancement, a relatively safe route around structural economic inequality and mass unemployment, an avenue for tapping into global supply chains and breaking out of local poverty and political inequality. Sitting in front of a glowing monitor thousands of miles from their victims, essentially immune from the law in St. Petersburg or Rio de Janeiro, scam-ming online must feel more like a virtual crime, with very tangible monetary rewards.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

Many such terms bubble up on the edges of such gatherings. Many wither on the vine, but sometimes events and wider trends push once-marginal concepts into the mainstream. That certainly happened with resilience, as a growing number of natural disasters hit major cities and battered and tangled global supply chains. One moment when this new normal forcibly impressed itself on businesspeople came when manufacturers of products like car parts and computer hard drives were hit by massive floods in Thailand during 2011.30 Billions of dollars of damage resulted, putting some 650,000 people at least temporarily out of work.


pages: 328 words: 90,677

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

Today, every major automaker has embraced the fundamentals of the Toyota Production System—and so have businesses in every kind of manufacturing and beyond. Part of this success stems from the fact that TPS is values based rather than prescriptive, making it easily adaptable to almost any business undertaking. But it remains most effective—indeed, necessary—in the massive and complex business of making cars, where every step in global supply chains is an opportunity for defects and inefficiencies to work into the system. One of the best known and most fundamental principles of lean manufacturing culture is kaizen, or continuous improvement. This goes in hand with another core value, long-term perspective. Both of these principles are part of Toyota’s managerial approach, called the Toyota Way.


pages: 312 words: 92,131

Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning by Tom Vanderbilt

AlphaGo, crowdsourcing, DeepMind, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunning–Kruger effect, fake it until you make it, functional fixedness, future of work, G4S, global supply chain, IKEA effect, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, spaced repetition, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

-Tropez—and an unfiltered, rather dour charm. One night at dinner, my wife received a compliment on the shirt she was wearing. She nonchalantly declared, “It’s from H&M.” Patricia suddenly slammed her hand on the table, startling everyone. “I am boycotting them!” she shouted. It had something to do with their global supply chains. But it was only one of a series of boycotts she seemed to be undertaking, and for sport we tried guessing which companies had or hadn’t escaped her withering attention. When we pulled up to the dock at one oceanfront seafood spot for lunch, she noticed a cluster of bleached shells conspicuously close to the restaurant.


pages: 339 words: 95,270

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace by Matthew C. Klein

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, centre right, collective bargaining, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of the telegraph, joint-stock company, land reform, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, paradox of thrift, passive income, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Wolfgang Streeck

action=n&pn=3800; and Statistics Canada, “Canada’s Merchandise Trade with the U.S. by State,” June 19, 2017, https://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/13-605-x/2017001/article/14841-eng.htm. 21. Based on manufacturing value added by country according to the World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.CD; Richard Baldwin, “Global Supply Chains: Why They Emerged, Why They Matter, and Where They Are Going,” in Global Value Chains in a Changing World, ed. Deborah K. Elms and Patrick Low (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press for the World Trade Organization, 2013); Robert C. Johnson and Guillermo Noguera, “Accounting for Intermediates: Production Sharing and Trade in Value Added,” Journal of International Economics 86, no. 2 (May 2011): 224–36; Marcel P.


pages: 406 words: 88,977

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates

augmented reality, call centre, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, demographic dividend, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, Edward Jenner, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hans Rosling, lockdown, Neal Stephenson, Picturephone, profit motive, QR code, remote working, social distancing, statistical model, TED Talk, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In the United States, the federal government is in the best position to drive large-scale development and production of vaccines, treatments, and personal protective equipment. But management of testing and hospital resources is inherently more local. And what about something like vaccine distribution? Although there will always be national and even global supply chains, the last mile for distribution is inherently local in nature. Japan did a good job of clarifying responsibilities at different levels and is a good model for others to study. Each government’s plan needs to account for the distribution of all the necessary tools, including masks, tests, treatments, and vaccines.


pages: 301 words: 90,276

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

Subsequent exposés by Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misconduct (SACOM), China Labor Watch, and the Institute for Global Labor Rights focused on facilities in mainland China producing Disney garments, toys, and children’s books. See SACOM, Looking for Mickey Mouse’s Conscience—A Survey of the Working Conditions of Disney’s Supplier Factories in China (Hong Kong: SACOM, 2005); and SACOM and Stop Toying Around, Exploitation of Toy Factory Workers at the Bottom of the Global Supply Chain (Hong Kong: SACOM, 2009). In almost every case of reported labor abuse, the company has denied responsibility, claiming that the problems lay with subcontractors. 43.  But this arrangement typically gave the employer far too much control over employees’ lives (as would have been the case in the ur-EPCOT company town).


pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

The funeral, held just as the Covid-19 pandemic was taking hold in the United States, was the last time such a collection of business luminaries would gather for more than a year. Within a matter of weeks, much of the global economy ground to a halt. Travel all but stopped. Restaurants were shuttered. Offices emptied out. Factories closed. Global supply chains sputtered. The stock market plunged and the mass layoffs began. Unemployment spiked to 15 percent in the United States. The ripple effects were endless. The pandemic provided a test case for companies that had boasted about stakeholder values and shared sacrifice, giving them an opportunity to recapture the spirit of the Golden Age of Capitalism and make good on the recently updated commitments of the Business Roundtable.


pages: 335 words: 89,924

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

One result is a meat-production system that can turn a fertile egg and a nine-pound (four-kilogram) bag of feed into a five-pound (two-kilogram) chicken in five weeks.71 Turkey production times almost halved between 1970 and 2000, down to twenty weeks from egg to thirty-five-pound (sixteen-kilogram) bird.72 Other animals have seen similar advances from a combination of breeding, concentrated feeding operations, and global supply chains. Half of the world’s pork is eaten in China, and its feed import sources are a planetary affair. As are the consequences: 14.5 percent of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are from livestock production.73 One pound (about half a kilogram) of beef requires 1,799 gallons (6,810 liters) of water and seven pounds (three kilograms) of feed to produce.74 The environmental consequences of meat production are, of course, external to the profit calculus of the industrial food system.


pages: 386 words: 91,913

The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbus A320, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, circular economy, Citizen Lab, clean tech, clean water, commoditize, Deng Xiaoping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairphone, geopolitical risk, gigafactory, glass ceiling, global supply chain, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, planned obsolescence, reshoring, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Our high-tech, green society is built on a wobbly foundation. Many have written about the economic and social effects of our international supply lines. Articles on abuse and mistreatment of workers in sweatshops and factories now abound in the press. Business journals examine which countries profit from the globalized supply chain of our electronic gadgets. Even coverage of the world’s electronic waste, burned in Africa and Asia, has now entered the global discussion. This book builds on those reports by examining the supply chain of the hidden rare metals that make modern life possible. These metals permeate our lives, allowing buildings to soar and our televisions to show vibrant colors.


The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle for America's Future by Michael Levi

addicted to oil, American energy revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, crony capitalism, deglobalization, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, manufacturing employment, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, South China Sea, stock buybacks

Daniel J. Cordier, “Mineral Commodity Summaries, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS),” January 2012, minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/rare_earths/mcs-2012-raree.pdf. 83. For information regarding Canada, see Cordier, “Mineral Commodity Summaries.” 84. Marc Humphries, “Rare Earth Elements: The Global Supply Chain,” Washington, D.C., Congressional Research Service, June 8, 2012. 85. Michael Allan McCrae, “Substitution Hurts Rare Earth Demand,” October 2, 2011, http://www.mining.com/substition-hurts-rare-earth-demand/. 86. Lee Levkowitz and Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, “China’s Rare Earths Industry and Its Role in the International Market,” Washington, D.C., U.S.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

Students are busy pushing organic, seasonal, slow food and food-miles agendas to catering giants such as Sodexho and Armamark Corporation. However, while these students are full of idealism for eco-eating, they (and we) are finding out the hard way the practicalities of global economics. Sourcing local ingredients from a multitude of small suppliers is time-consuming and expensive compared to hiring a single company with a global supply chain. But, like they say, principles aren’t principles until they cost time and money. 194 FUTURE FILES Buying an organic tomato in a supermarket is all very well, but if the tomato has been grown using child labor in Zimbabwe and then flown from Harare to London by a company owned by a corrupt politician it’s not ethically produced, is it?


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Governments try to step into the shoes of the village gossip, but the regulations and rulings their bureaucrats and judges hand down are never as responsive to local conditions as community members are. Despite these advantages, moral economies break down as the scope and scale of trade expand. We benefit from mass production and global supply chains because fixed costs of production are spread over millions of people and we can draw on diverse skills and inputs from around the world, resulting in delightful products at very low prices. But if millions of people worldwide consume a product, it is impractical for them to coordinate a boycott—except in unusual cases—if the product is hazardous or of low quality.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

It’s just the lowest-hanging fruit: “smaller than the challenge of electrifying almost everything that uses power,” Steffen says, by which he means anything that runs on much dirtier gas engines. That task, he continues, is smaller than the challenge of reducing energy demand, which is smaller than the challenge of reinventing how goods and services are provided—given that global supply chains are built with dirty infrastructure and labor markets everywhere are still powered by dirty energy. There is also the need to get to zero emissions from all other sources—deforestation, agriculture, livestock, landfills. And the need to protect all human systems from the coming onslaught of natural disasters and extreme weather.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Their business is about storing value, wagering on the future, and then using contracts to leverage present expectations against future realities. They may make a lot of money without creating any tangible value, but they do help create liquidity in markets that need it and force a bit of planning or austerity when something is going to be in short supply. However, new technologies and global supply chains are turning formerly seasonal commodities into year-round products. And consumers’ decreasing awareness of seasons is changing what we expect to find at our local market and when. This longer now of both supply and demand cycles is doing to many commodities traders what twenty-four-hour cable did to the evening news: in a world of constant flow, the ability to compress time becomes superfluous.


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

And in the summer of 2015, Amazon discovered that it was selling a magazine produced by and promoting the murderous group Daesh, better known to Westerners as ISIS.37 Embarrassing episodes are an almost unavoidable by-product of the messy way in which Amazon lets third parties hawk their goods on the Amazon website. As the designer Tim Maly comments, “Amazon isn’t a store, not really. Not in any sense that we can regularly think about stores. It’s a strange pulsing network of potential goods, global supply chains, and alien associative algorithms with the skin of a store stretched over it, so we don’t lose our minds.”38 Amazon’s experiments with third-party sellers began with Amazon auctions—“That didn’t work out very well,” admits Bezos39—and then Z-shops, and finally Marketplace. Marketplace drove Amazon’s own category managers crazy because they found themselves undercut on their own website by third-party sellers; meanwhile it leads to the never-ending risk that a third-party seller will do something embarrassing—such as sell pro-rape T-shirts—on the Amazon site, right beneath the Amazon logo.


pages: 402 words: 98,760

Deep Sea and Foreign Going by Rose George

Admiral Zheng, air freight, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, bank run, cable laying ship, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Costa Concordia, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Filipino sailors, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, intermodal, Jones Act, London Whale, Malacca Straits, Panamax, pattern recognition, profit maximization, Skype, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

While the box is sailing safely onwards, updates on its progress are electronically transmitted to the United States. If further doubt remains about the level of risk it poses, upon arrival the container is screened with more non-intrusive inspection equipment and detained or set free to furnish an American home or fuel an American car. It is a beautiful vision of a safer global supply chain. For now, it is still only a vision. According to the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act, enforced in 2007, a system to scan 100 per cent of all US-bound cargo had to be in place by July 2012. Six foreign ports signed up to the 100 per cent requirement, and by February 2012, five had dropped out.


pages: 493 words: 98,982

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

This requires a sense of community sufficiently robust to enable citizens to say, and to believe, that “we are all in this together”—not as a ritual incantation in times of crisis, but as a plausible description of our everyday lives. Over the past four decades, market-driven globalization and the meritocratic conception of success, taken together, have unraveled these moral ties. Global supply chains, capital flows, and the cosmopolitan identities they fostered made us less reliant on our fellow citizens, less grateful for the work they do, and less open to the claims of solidarity. Meritocratic sorting taught us that our success is our own doing, and so eroded our sense of indebtedness.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

By doing so, they shed the obligations, costs, and worker safety nets that accompany traditional employment classifications. Nation-states like India sweetened the deal for conglomerates with state-funded expansion of global satellite systems and tax-free IT industrial parks. These new links in the global supply chain hired and fired locals at will to process everything from airline schedules and insurance audits to full-time employees’ paychecks. India’s economic liberalization, in 1991, included the development of the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI) in every major city in the country.38 Finance minister Manmohan Singh, a Cambridge- and Oxford-trained economist who would later be prime minister, argued that India’s socialist economy, long propped up by its trading partner the Soviet Union, would need to liberalize and to deregulate its markets to survive the fall of the Iron Curtain.


pages: 330 words: 99,044

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire by Rebecca Henderson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, asset allocation, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, dark matter, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, growth hacking, Hans Rosling, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, means of production, meta-analysis, microcredit, middle-income trap, Minsky moment, mittelstand, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, plant based meat, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, Toyota Production System, uber lyft, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WeWork, working-age population, Zipcar

One study, for example, analyzed the effectiveness of private sector regulation in the apparel and electronics industries. It drew on five years of research, more than 700 interviews, visits to 120 factories, and extensive quantitative data.57 The author concluded that while there was much that could be done, private sector compliance programs were unlikely to solve the full set of labor problems in the global supply chain. In his words: After more than a decade of concerted efforts by global brands and labor rights NGOs alike, private compliance programs appear largely unable to deliver on their promise of sustained improvements in labor standards.… Compliance efforts have delivered some improvements in working conditions… (but) these improvements seem to have hit a ceiling: basic improvements have been achieved in some areas (e.g.: health and safety) but not in others (e.g. freedom of association, excessive working hours).


pages: 285 words: 98,832

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

The Panther would remain in hibernation right through the first months of the pandemic as the company that made it scrambled to make the materials required to run it. A weird black market would arise in the stuff you needed to wake the Panther up: Joe had a photo of a guy selling Panther equipment out of the back of his car. “Here is the frightening aspect of the global supply chain,” said Joe. “When there is a surge in demand, inventory goes to zero. Just-in-time manufacturing. Great concept! Horrible in a pandemic.” Microbiology labs across America all had the same frustration: fancy razors with no razor blades. Joe knew enough about the sample-to-answer testing machines to know they’d be a constraint.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

This “thing” is ultimately indistinguishable from (if not reducible to) the traces that it produces about itself and its various relations with the world that brought it into being.16 The SPIME is then a kind of meta-diagram that precedes the object's manufacture, couches its real physical life in the world, and outlasts its recycling; it is the “thing” defined as an artificial temporal instance of digital-physical relations from beginning to end. The politics of the SPIME motivates interest in making global supply chains deeply transparent, and in principle more accountable and sustainable. The hope is that if any interested User can “read” the complete biography of a thing, measure all of the conditions of its appearance, use, and disappearance now captured as extensible metadata, then the politics of its chemical and mineral origins (as discussed in Earth chapter) or factory labor conditions, or nutritional authenticity, or post-use death cycle might become more legible currencies of everyday material culture.

The hope is that if any interested User can “read” the complete biography of a thing, measure all of the conditions of its appearance, use, and disappearance now captured as extensible metadata, then the politics of its chemical and mineral origins (as discussed in Earth chapter) or factory labor conditions, or nutritional authenticity, or post-use death cycle might become more legible currencies of everyday material culture. From other highly controlled perspectives, such transparencies are common in global supply chains but are guarded proprietary sources of competitive information, not public platforms (see the discussion in the Cloud chapter on Amazon and Walmart). But as object fashioning also moves from far-flung extraction-design-factory-distribution chains to scenarios associated with networked 3D printing, then the public constitution of the thing as a traceable data shell is perhaps both more apparent and more salient for end Users.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

And we have been reminded of this fact as a nation in just the past few years—that just as cities are a source of strength, they are often vulnerable to the shocks and disruptions of our modern world. When Superstorm Sandy barreled up the East Coast of the United States, making a direct hit on New York City, economic activity and commerce felt its impact all over the world. When Bangkok flooded in 2011, many global supply chains ground to a halt. Cities themselves are weakened by vulnerabilities in individual communities within the city. When one part of the city loses connection to a critical system, the stability of the entire region can be threatened. But examples of innovation happening all over the world give us good reason for optimism.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

Thus, by frugal innovation, the country leapfrogged over the creation of a traditional banking system, at least as it exists in much of the rest of the world. While many of the world’s economies have stagnated since the economic crisis in 2008, Africa’s have continued to grow at a fast pace. With this growth, Africans are increasingly both the founder-entrepreneurs as well as a part of global supply chains. More and more of Africa’s technology-savvy youth are entering the workforce and starting their own companies or working remotely for Asian, American, or European companies. This is changing the nature of Africa’s relationship with the rest of the world as its connections shift from being rooted in philanthropy and development aid to being rooted in business.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

And the public’s anxiety gives them the license to bring out all their pet projects, all the favors to special interests, and all the schemes their ideological leanings and political connections predispose them to. Similarly, as we have seen, the Federal Reserve, though ostensibly independent, has a very difficult task. It is extremely hard to ensure rapid job growth in an integrated, innovative economy where firms use recessions to refocus on becoming more productive or to strengthen their global supply chains, shifting jobs elsewhere. Moreover, the new technologies employed in hiring allow firms the luxury of waiting to fill positions. The sustained easy monetary policy that is maintained while jobs are still scarce has the effect of increasing risk taking and inflating asset-price bubbles, which again weaken the fabric of the economy over the longer term.


pages: 409 words: 105,551

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman, Chris Fussell

Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Black Swan, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Chelsea Manning, clockwork universe, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Henri Poincaré, high batting average, Ida Tarbell, information security, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, job automation, job satisfaction, John Nash: game theory, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pneumatic tube, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

We might recoil today at the brutal consequences of mechanized warfare and the dehumanizing connotations of the assembly line, but the principles that undergird these systems remain firmly embedded in the way organizations of all types approach management and leadership. We still search faithfully for the one best way to do things; we still think of organizational leaders as planners, synchronizers, and coordinators—chess-player strategists responsible for overseeing interlocking troop movements, marketing initiatives, or global supply chains. The structures of our organizations reflect this ideal. Whether imbued with a “lazy worker” Theory X or a “motivated worker” Theory Y disposition, the “org charts” of most multiperson endeavors look pretty similar: a combination of specialized vertical columns (departments or divisions) and horizontal tiers that denote levels of authority, with the most powerful literally on top—the only tier that can access all columns.


pages: 445 words: 105,255

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

As for mining, APM naturally consumes and produces a different mix of materials (no need for the iron and chromium in stainless steel, no need for lead and tin in solder) and as it happens, the most useful elements—including carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and silicon—are not at all scarce. On grounds of performance and cost, even common structural materials will be subject to widespread displacement, and with them, most mines. (Chapter 11 explores questions of APM-based product performance, cost, and resource requirements in greater depth.) Today, trade builds global supply chains that lead from mines and wells to smelters and refineries, to materials processing plants, to networks of factories that shape and assemble components to make final products. As we will see, with APM-based technologies it would be natural for these long, specialized supply chains to collapse to a few steps of local production, progressing from common materials to simple chemical feedstocks; from simple feedstocks to generic, microscale building blocks; and then from generic components to an endless range of products, much as printers can be used to arrange generic pixels to form an endless range of images.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

-China Chamber of Commerce, summed matters up with some reluctance “As long as consumers are looking for the lowest possible costs,” he said, “[regulations are] not going to have a long-term impact.” ROUGHLY 25 PERCENT of the global workforce is now Chinese. Given such enormous firepower, China inevitably sets the norm for wages and working standards in the global supply chain. American corporate interests have chipped away at those standards and wages in order to maximize profits and influence, and to serve their shareholders. The chronic disregard for workers’ rights in China’s foreign-invested private sector threatens wages and working conditions around the globe, including the hard-won gains of American workers.


pages: 363 words: 105,039

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Jeffrey Bader, president of a Port Newark–based trucking group, the Association of Bi-State Motor Carriers, estimates that the unreimbursed cost for trucking companies and truckers alone was in the tens of millions. “It was a nightmare,” Bader said. “We lost a lot of money, and we’re angry.” The wider cost of Maersk’s disruption to the global supply chain as a whole—which depends on just-in-time delivery of products and manufacturing components—is far harder to measure. And, of course, Maersk was only one victim. Only when you start to multiply Maersk’s story—imagining the same paralysis, the same serial crises, the same grueling recovery—playing out across dozens of other NotPetya victims and countless other industries does the true scale of Russia’s cyberwar crime begin to come into focus.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Newspapers have essentially been in decline since the mid-1990s, when the commercial Internet took off.35 Today, over 62 percent of the U.S. population gets news from some form of social media, with Facebook being the dominant source, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. But looking at the patent issue makes it clear that there is a price to be paid for the “information wants to be free” approach in other industries as well—including the technology business itself. While the complexity of global supply chains and investments makes it tough to show clear causality between patent protection and innovation in the United States, the trend lines do not look good. According to one study, the shifts in patent regulation have cost the U.S. economy $1 trillion. Venture capital investment in biotech has been down in recent years, in part because it’s tougher to patent certain kinds of innovation.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

As Ensmenger puts it, “For the most part, we experience only the positive benefits of information technology, in large part because the labor and geography associated with the construction, maintenance, and dismantling of our digital devices has been rendered largely invisible.”388 That device you hold in your hand is but a tiny manifestation of a vast and extended global supply chain, and the culmination of numerous labour-intensive, highly industrialized, energy-intensive, and environmentally damaging processes spread around the world. Each time you swipe, text, or search, in your own small way you are contributing to a planet-wide syndrome that risks our very survival as a species.


pages: 368 words: 102,379

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

When Trump appointed Navarro to enforce the Defense Production Act and compel U.S. companies to prioritize manufacturing for the COVID-19 response, Yossi Sheffi, the director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, expressed disbelief. “We have some of the largest companies in the world who are running global supply chains [and] have contractor relationships all over the world,” Sheffi told Mother Jones magazine. “There are literally thousands of them. Any of them would be doing a better job than a crackpot economist.” I would not deign to resort to such hyperbole, as I’ve never met Navarro, nor do I claim to be an economist, crackpot or otherwise.


pages: 312 words: 108,194

Invention: A Life by James Dyson

3D printing, additive manufacturing, augmented reality, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, coronavirus, country house hotel, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Indoor air pollution, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, mittelstand, remote working, rewilding, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, uranium enrichment, warehouse automation, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

We deliberately avoided traditional ventilator components due to potential supply issues, using instead those we knew were readily available and which we could rely on. The team grew quickly to about 450 people working across the U.K. and Singapore so we could achieve twenty-four-hour working cycles and draw on our global supply chains and knowledge. Our Singapore engineering team picked up while the U.K. team was sleeping and vice versa, but the days were still long, often stretching deep into the night. It was an extraordinary project. The feedback we got from clinicians was good, and within two weeks we had a new ventilator ready for clinical testing.


EuroTragedy: A Drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, book scanning, book value, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, credit crunch, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, global macro, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, inflation targeting, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land bank, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, neoliberal agenda, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, pension reform, precautionary principle, premature optimization, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Italian stocks fell by 3.3 percent; banks and insurers, who held substantial quantities of government bonds, took a special beating.47 Soon enough, another rating agency, Moody’s, placed the Italian government and banks on “review for possible downgrade.”48 All this while, global economic and financial tensions had been rising. On March 11, a monstrous earthquake and tsunami off the northern coast of Japan damaged nuclear reactors, the fallout from which threatened to cause vast additional damage. Amid the human tragedy, the Japanese link in global supply chains broke, disrupting world trade. Torsten Sløk, chief international economist at Deutsche Bank, captured the change in global mood: “the world is rapidly becoming a scarier place.”49 Starting in early April, global stock markets tumbled at a pace not seen since the days following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy.

However, the dividend from world trade has diminished over the years as several eurozone economies, especially those in the south, have lost competitiveness. Moreover, significant and extended pickups in world trade have become less frequent, confirming researchers’ views that the era of hyperglobalization is over.7 Global supply chains—​set up to source materials, parts, and equipment from low-​cost locations around the world—​are now largely in place. Compared with the blistering 9 percent growth rate in the pre-​global-​crisis years between 2004 and 2007, the rate of world trade growth now stays, generally, in the range of 3 to 5 percent a 5 Per capita GDP growth rate of the median euroarea country, percent 1946–1970 1920–1929 Before 1991 4 3 1971–1990 1890–1899 1999–2008 2 1991–1998 1930–1939 1 2009–2016 After 1991 0 –2 0 2 4 6 8 10 Annual average world trade growth, percent Figure 10.1.


pages: 409 words: 118,448

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy by Marc Levinson

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, deindustrialization, endogenous growth, falling living standards, financial deregulation, flag carrier, floating exchange rates, full employment, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, intermodal, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, linear programming, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Multi Fibre Arrangement, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Phillips curve, price stability, purchasing power parity, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, working-age population, yield curve, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

It accounted for three-quarters of the world’s population in 1973, as crisis enveloped Western Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan, but only a third of the world’s output of goods and services. China, with an income per person one-twentieth that of the United States, had yet to launch the economic reforms that would turbocharge its growth in later decades. And Southeast Asia, far from being a critical link in global supply chains, seemed hopelessly crippled by war and internal violence. The Third World was connected to the international economy mainly as a source of raw materials. It supplied a scant 7 percent of the world’s exports of manufactured goods. The Third World’s explosive growth in the 1970s was fueled by the petrodollars that were causing such worry for central bankers like Gordon Richardson and Arthur Burns.


pages: 437 words: 113,173

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

The Economist. Retrieved from www.economist.com. 65. For more on the Thailand case, see Goldin, Ian and Mike Mariathasan (2014), The Butterfly Defect. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 66. Chongvilaivan, Aekapol (2012). “Thailand’s 2011 Flooding: Its Impact on Direct Exports and Global Supply Chains.” ARTNeT Working Paper Series, No. 113. Retrieved from hdl.handle.net/10419/64271. 67. Thailand Board of Investment (2012). “Expertise, New Investment Keep Thai E&E Industry at the Top.” Thailand Investment Review. Retrieved from www.boi.go.th. 68. Abe, Masato and Linghe Ye (2013).


pages: 482 words: 117,962

Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

“Network diasporas,” Kuznetsov argues, “are but the latest bridge institutions connecting developing economy insiders, with their risk mitigating knowledge and connections, to outsiders in command of technical know-how and investment capital.”103 For countries to successfully tap into their overseas expertise, there need to be conditions at home that are attractive for expatriates to return to or invest in. Migrants in a diaspora are unlikely to spontaneously fire up a flailing national economy; they are a resource that can reinforce or accelerate existing positive trends.104 India's Dynamic Diaspora Network The development of global supply chains, decentralized systems of production, and modern information technologies have facilitated the transformation of brain drain from India into “diaspora networks” that are supporting the IT sector at home. India's universities are thriving, and many of its best graduates seek out jobs in Silicon Valley, where they are supported by established professional networks for Indian nationals.


pages: 515 words: 117,501

Miracle Cure by William Rosen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, biofilm, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, creative destruction, demographic transition, discovery of penicillin, do well by doing good, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frances Oldham Kelsey, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, functional fixedness, germ theory of disease, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, microbiome, New Journalism, obamacare, out of africa, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, stem cell, the long tail, transcontinental railway, working poor

The new law, yet another amendment to the original 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, included dozens of provisions regarding everything from a new protocol for the approval of medical devices, to the authorization of fees for users of generic and prescription pharmaceuticals, to protection of the global supply chain for finished drugs. Less well publicized, but almost certainly as important, it incorporated into the legislation a series of provisions known collectively by the acronym GAIN: Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now. Intended to increase the likelihood that pharmaceutical companies would invest in the development of antibiotics that treat serious or life-threatening conditions, GAIN offered fast-track approval for compounds that promised to combat infections, and a five-year extension of their exclusive term of patent.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

They’ve created the diversity of the modern city and workplace, bringing many people into contact daily with a much wider variety of others than ever used to be the case. And there are much larger geographical distances in production too, due the fact that economies have become more open to trade and investment, and that companies are more likely to be part of a global supply chain. THE CHALLENGE OF BUILDING TRUST There are, then, a number of ways in which the technology-driven structural changes in the economy have been simultaneously increasing the importance of trust or social capital and making it more fragile. At the heart of this tension is the way so many people of so many different backgrounds, expectations, and habits are now in contact with each other.


pages: 411 words: 114,717

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

Trade between nations is rising much faster than income within nations. Back in 1960 every percentage point increase in global income was accompanied by a 2 percent increase in trade flows; today every percentage point increase in income is matched by a 4 percent rise in trade. The increasing integration of global supply chains is a major reason why developed and developing economies began to expand and contract in sync over the last decade. It is also why emerging markets, too, can expect a shift to more frequent downturns. If the historical record cited above is any guide, the expansion phases are likely to shorten by a half or more to around three years across the global economy.


pages: 342 words: 114,118

After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, British Empire, centre right, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, independent contractor, invisible hand, late capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, South China Sea, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, Washington Consensus, young professional, zero-sum game

The first American presidential campaign after the Berlin Wall came down was driven by a slogan—“It’s the economy, stupid”—whose very effectiveness became a trap. GDP growth. Deficits. Gas prices. The markets. The politics of wealth creation. The wealth that funds politics. The wealthy and the politicians appearing on panel discussions at international conferences to discuss vague concepts of global security, global supply chains, and global sustainability in a world where consumption has made life on earth unsustainable. Washington and Brussels, London and New York, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. The computer, laptop, phone—devices that host platforms that offer the convenience of mind-numbing, socially isolating content in exchange for vast troves of data that make you a more perfect consumer.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

A 2018 independent fact-finding mission report describes the unfolding process of dispossession: “Appropriation of vacated land and terrain clearance, erasing every trace of the Rohingya communities, and the construction on this land of houses for other ethnic groups.”102 The insertion of Myanmar into the global supply chain has also opened lands to capital investment for agribusiness, industrial manufacturing, timber extraction, geothermal projects, and mining. India and China, with their respective Look East policy and Belt and Road Initiative, have invested in multimillion-dollar infrastructure projects, including pipelines and ports in the Rakhine region, dubbed “Asia’s final frontier.”


pages: 409 words: 125,611

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, computer age, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of DNA, Doha Development Round, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, information asymmetry, job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population

The former would exacerbate the country’s slowdown, and neither change is in the cards. As China increases its consumption, it will not necessarily buy more goods from the United States. In fact, it is more likely to increase consumption of nontraded goods—like health care and education—resulting in profound disturbances to the global supply chain, especially in countries that had been supplying the inputs to China’s manufacturing exporters. Finally, there is a worldwide crisis in inequality. The problem is not only that the top income groups are getting a larger share of the economic pie, but also that those in the middle are not sharing in economic growth, while in many countries poverty is increasing.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

The Korean company Samsung had been a dominant force early in the smartphone era as it rolled out a series of popular phones and tablets, but it, too, eventually saw sales and earnings deteriorate. Total unit sales in 2016, after four consecutive years of decline, were lower than they had been since 2011. Modern smartphones are incredibly complicated devices that must be designed well and built reliably. The engineering expertise and global supply chain capabilities required to do this are so formidable that only a handful of companies in the world ever try. Yet, as expectations and specifications continually change, few of them make much money for any length of time, even though they serve an enormous global market that has emerged in less than a decade.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

We know that economic forces, and requirements founded in the material conditions of production, shape the organization of human settlements at every scale. Local and precise control over the physical form of things therefore challenges the way we think about the spatial form and social life of cities. To offer just two examples: should local fabrication eliminate extended global supply chains, much of the land we now dedicate to warehousing and distribution could be repurposed, along with the transport capacity now required to move things around. And if we consider that retail is primarily the short-term storage and display for sale of branded goods, the implications of widespread fabrication are equally clear.


pages: 587 words: 117,894

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

. “$100 million helicopter” Katie Drummond, “Military’s New Plan to Weed Out Counterfeits: Plant DNA,” Danger Room (blog), Wired, January 20, 2012, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/01/dna-counterfeits/. “trusted delivery systems” Darrell West, “12 Ways to Build Trust in the Global ICT Trade,” Brookings, April 18, 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/04/18-global-supply-chain-west. “America’s digital infrastructure” Executive Office of the President of the United States, “The Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative,” March 2, 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/cybersecurity.pdf. APPROACH IT AS A PUBLIC-PRIVATE PROBLEM: HOW DO WE BETTER COORDINATE DEFENSE?


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Nokia’s new strategy was decided long before the cell-phone market revolution had gathered speed and one can only admire Nokia’s decision to abandon what was familiar for something uncertain. The strategy paid off – handsomely. Thirteen years later Nokia had sold over 1 billion phones. It mastered, even spearheaded, the practice of new market sales and lean operations through globalized supply chains. In 2007 the Nokia brand was the fifth most valued in the world. At its peak, the company’s stock market value exceeded $350 billion. Nokia is an example of a company that did not just develop a technology but brought it successfully to market through a good deal of creative destruction.


pages: 421 words: 120,332

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

To be sure, routes are shorter across the Arctic Ocean, but the travel speeds, owing to the danger of ice, are lower.368 If the region’s emerging regulatory framework demands that only polar-class ships be allowed in, then those vessels will cost considerably more than ordinary single-hulled ships. And how attractive will a short, unpredictable shipping season really be for today’s tightly scheduled global supply chains? What about the relative lack of emergency and port services, environmental liability for oil spills, or fees charged by Russia and Canada should they reaffirm their positions that the Northwest Passage and Northern Sea Route are not international straits?369 Might the Suez and Panama canals lower their prices in response to the new competition?


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Wal-Mart’s customers weren’t the critical population for it to capture, however. Retail customers gradually became a little captured in some locations where retail choice was eventually reduced, but for the most part they could shop elsewhere if they were so inclined, but it was the optimization of the global supply chain through the use of punishing network effects that really empowered and enriched Wal-Mart. CHAPTER 14 Obscuring the Human Element Noticing the New Order Every tale of adventure lately seems to include a scene in which characters are attempting to crack the security of someone else’s computer.


Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

Apparently, machine learning methods and graphics processors are being applied that have not previously been used in motor vehicles. The RIO platform, which is developed by MAN, is an example of the increasing digitisation of the transport and logistics eco-system. This open, cloud-based platform covers the global supply chain from the consigner via the forwarding agent and transport company, shipper, dispatcher and driver to the recipient. In this way, all information of the goods traffic of logistics companies can be bundled, no matter whether it originates from a freight plane or freight ship, from a goods train or from a lorry.


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

Liquor distilleries began making hand sanitizer, and some gave it away for free to help out.56 Sportswear manufacturers shifted from making T-shirts to making masks.57 Working with GE and 3M, Ford Motor Company used repurposed car parts, such as fans and batteries, to make simplified ventilators.58 Many of the industries that provide items to combat the virus itself will see elevated demand continue for the duration of the immediate pandemic period, though not with the same intensity as during the first wave. While distilleries will probably switch back to making drinks, and Ford will go back to making cars, other structural changes in our economy could be long-lasting. Global supply chains could shrink, and there might be full repatriation of manufacturing facilities of certain industries—for instance, the pharmaceutical industry or high-tech machinery.59 Before the pandemic, the emphasis was on just-in-time production, with parts being delivered just when they were needed in the manufacturing process.


pages: 378 words: 121,495

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

By not placing the adjective Western or European or American before the noun civilization, Harris and Blaine could argue that Japan and Latin America might be culturally or historically different from the United States and from the West, but with sufficient tutelage or sufficient force they would achieve the American standard of wealth, education and comfort. Properly raised up, they could enter into the global supply chains and industrial productivity that described modern civilization. This was civilization as process, as technique, civilization as a matter of economic stages. The twentieth-century language of economic modernization and development has its precursors in the nineteenth-century language of civilization.


pages: 516 words: 116,875

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

sh=5beba7d41dfe 37 https://www.asianentrepreneur.org/why-are-rich-chinese-entrepreneurs-leaving-china/ 38 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092415/chinas-stock-markets-vs-us-stock-markets.asp 39 https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092415/chinas-stock-markets-vs-us-stock-markets.asp 40 https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_650553.pdf 41 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2017/08/16/china-wage-levels-equal-to-or-surpass-parts-of-europe/#5f4a34d53e7f 42 https://napsintl.com/manufacturing-in-mexico/mexico-vs-china-manufacturing-comparison/ 43 https://www.economist.com/special-report/2020/02/06/china-wants-to-put-itself-back-at-the-centre-of-the-world 44 https://thediplomat.com/2017/05/reviving-the-comatose-bangladesh-china-india-myanmar-corridor/ 45 https://thediplomat.com/2016/08/tibet-and-chinas-belt-and-road/ 46 https://globalshippersalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Study_EP_IPOL_STU2018585907_EN.pdf 47 https://www.mhlnews.com/global-supply-chain/article/22042478/more-competition-for-us-west-coast-ports 48 https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/2001843/controversial-thai-canal-back-in-spotlight 49 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-canal-through-central-america-could-have-devastating-consequences-180953394/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2020/01/31/inside-the-belt-and-roads-premier-white-elephant-melaka-gateway/?


pages: 448 words: 123,273

Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food by Chris van Tulleken

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", biofilm, carbon footprint, clean water, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cotton gin, COVID-19, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, food desert, Gary Taubes, George Floyd, global supply chain, Helicobacter pylori, Kinder Surprise, longitudinal study, luminiferous ether, meta-analysis, microbiome, NOVA classification, parabiotic, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford marshmallow experiment, twin studies, ultra-processed food, Vanguard fund, Walter Mischel, Wayback Machine

Smell is all about selecting safe and nutritious food, while avoiding toxic, unsafe food. It’s one of the earliest warning systems for whether something is safe to eat. After all, by the time you can taste something, it may already be too late, but there is also the safety net of bitter receptors at the back of the mouth, which we’ll come to. Thanks to the global supply chains of modern supermarkets, many of us are used to fruit being ready to eat and ripe all year round, but in a tropical forest this isn’t the case. Toxin levels vary, and a piece of fruit may be edible for quite a narrow window, typically determined by exactly when the plant wants the animal to eat it and disperse the seeds.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

A web of transit lines spans the area around Atacama, and the next day, Enrique, Jason, and I spend hours driving down private mining roads, passing semitrucks and tankers hauling lithium and potassium or returning to the salar for another load. More memorials marking fatal accidents dot the sides of the road. On the rare occasions it rains, flooding can shut down the entire operation and send a ripple through the entire global-supply chain. But mostly, the plight belongs to wearied drivers, taking extra trips to earn extra money and pushing the limits. There’s no spectacular white desert at Salar del Carmen, just a series of towering cylinders, a couple more pools, and rows of thrumming machinery. The refinery operation is an industrial winter wonderland.


pages: 370 words: 129,096

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

said Lyons. (The work on the Smart car eventually led to Daimler buying a 10 percent stake in Tesla.) Marks’s inclination was to try to package Tesla as an asset that could be sold to a larger car company. It was a perfectly reasonable plan. While running Flextronics, Marks had overseen a vast, global supply chain and knew the difficulties of manufacturing intimately. Tesla must have looked borderline hopeless to him at this point. The company could not make its one product well, was poised to hemorrhage money, and had missed a string of delivery deadlines and yet its engineers were still off doing side experiments.


pages: 651 words: 135,818

China into Africa: trade, aid, and influence by Robert I. Rotberg

barriers to entry, BRICs, colonial rule, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, low interest rates, megacity, megaproject, microcredit, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Scramble for Africa, Shenzhen special economic zone , South China Sea, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, trade route, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Going forward, African countries should focus on engaging the Chinese to work with African firms to enhance value-added production, both in natural resources to create backward and forward linkages domestically and in other (non–natural resource related) sectors to enable Africa to participate more effectively in global supply chains. Notes 1. Puri Lakshmi, “A Silent Revolution in South-South Trade,” World Trade Organization (Geneva, 2004), available at www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dda_e/symp04_ paper7_e.doc (accessed 25 February 2008). 05-7561-4 ch5.qxd 9/16/08 4:14 PM Page 108 108 harry g. broadman 2. Harry G.


pages: 442 words: 130,526

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age by James Crabtree

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, business climate, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, informal economy, Joseph Schumpeter, land bank, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, Meghnad Desai, middle-income trap, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Rubik’s Cube, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, special economic zone, spectrum auction, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism, young professional

Unable to rely on India’s ramshackle infrastructure, the tycoon built his own private railways and power lines. Lacking easy access to domestic coal, he bought mines in Indonesia and Australia, and took their contents back home through his port. In the process he built “a vertically integrated global supply chain reminiscent of when Henry Ford once owned Brazilian rubber plantations to supply his car factories,” as the New York Times put it.1 More to the point, his was an expansion that closely mirrored India’s own. As the country enjoyed its fastest ever growth in the mid-2000s, so Adani undertook one of its most extravagant investment sprees.


pages: 496 words: 131,938

The Future Is Asian by Parag Khanna

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Basel III, bike sharing, birth tourism , blockchain, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cross-border payments, currency peg, death from overwork, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, factory automation, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial engineering, fixed income, flex fuel, gig economy, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green transition, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, light touch regulation, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, Malacca Straits, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, Monroe Doctrine, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, Parag Khanna, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

The overflowing street-side cafés of Lahore and Karachi represent the onset of what the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid describes as “infinite demand.” E-commerce is also growing along with 4G and broadband connectivity. Alibaba launched a national AliExpress.com shopping site for Pakistan in 2017. The Hong Kong–based global supply chain manager Li & Fung is a superb proxy for South Asia’s thriving logistics and retail sectors. In the words of the company’s CFO, Spencer Fung, the company’s size makes it a “bowling ball amidst grains of sand.” As Li & Fung shifts from simple wage arbitrage (cost optimization) toward geographic arbitrage (speed optimization), it is becoming ever more a global company first and a Chinese company second.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Predictions that tariffs would lead to less employment in these green jobs seem to have been borne out, and that means environmentally friendly energy production has been reduced. Jobs were certainly destroyed in the process of globalization, but they will be destroyed again in the process of the reckless deglobalization proposed by Trump. The world has created efficient global supply chains, and wise nations take advantage of them. For America to walk away from these supply chains will make our firms less competitive. Most importantly, there are large costs of adjustment. Adjusting to globalization was hard, and we—and especially our workers—paid a high price. But we will pay another high price as we try to adjust to deglobalization.32 Global Cooperation in the Twenty-First Century While protectionism won’t help the US, or even those who have suffered from deindustrialization, it can have profoundly negative effects on America’s trading partners and the global economy.


pages: 518 words: 143,914

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge

affirmative action, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Brooks, Dr. Strangelove, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, global supply chain, God and Mammon, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, liberation theology, low skilled workers, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, stem cell, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

They are the modern equivalents of the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Musalmans—“Indians in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” These global figures are hardwired into the global world. They are trained in American-style business schools—the boot camps of globalization—and they spend their time dealing with people who speak the same dismal language. This is a world of “global supply chains” and “value propositions” rather than local traditions and obligations. GO FORTH AND MULTIPLEX The assault on tradition is often an assault on religion. Most of the time this is unintentional: Western companies embody a message about consumption and personal autonomy that raises many hackles.


pages: 545 words: 137,789

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy

Abraham Wald, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Blythe Masters, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, Columbine, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, debt deflation, different worldview, diversification, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, Haight Ashbury, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income per capita, incomplete markets, index fund, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, mental accounting, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, negative equity, Network effects, Nick Leeson, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Two Sigma, unorthodox policies, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

Apple’s iPod, of which more than 175 million have been sold, was conceived in Silicon Valley; most of the software it operates on was written in Hyderabad, India; and it is manufactured in China, where Apple has outsourced production to a number of Taiwanese companies. The music player contains 451 parts, including a hard drive made by Japan’s Toshiba; two microchips produced by American companies, Broadcom and PortalPlayer; and a memory chip made by Samsung, a Korean firm. Each of these components, in turn, has a complicated global supply chain. The iPod is rightly seen as a triumph of American innovation and marketing. It is also a pocket-size emblem of the division of labor. (In June 2006, The Mail on Sunday, a British newspaper, revealed that many of the Chinese workers assembling iPods were young women who worked fifteen hours a day and lived in corporate dormitories, earning less than fifty dollars a month.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

However, the aftermath will include a resumption of Chinese efforts to cap or even devalue the yuan in foreign exchange markets to promote exports, create jobs, and restore wealth lost in the collapse. In the short run, this will prove deflationary as underpriced Chinese goods once again flood into global supply chains. In the longer run, Chinese deflation will be met with U.S. and Japanese inflation, as both countries print money to offset any appreciation in the yen or the dollar. At that point, the currency wars will be reignited, never really having gone away. Not all of these seven signs may come to pass.


pages: 448 words: 142,946

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

In the absence of local government support, because complementary fiat currencies are not easily convertible into dollars, businesses are generally much less willing to accept them than they are proxy currencies. That is because in the current economic system, there is little infrastructure to source goods locally. Locally owned businesses are plugged into the same global supply chains as everyone else. Regrowing the infrastructure of local production and distribution will take time, as well as a change in macroeconomic conditions driven by the internalization of costs, the end of growth pressure, and a social and political decision to relocalize. Noneconomic factors can influence the social agreement of money.


pages: 515 words: 142,354

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

There is another kind of transaction cost that sharing a currency may reduce: the exchange-rate risk going forward of longer-term investments that we discussed earlier in the chapter. But these costs have had at best a second-order effect in major production and supply chain decisions. China, for instance, has become integrally incorporated into the global supply chain, in spite of exchange-rate risk as well as political and supply-side risks. Of course, if the benefits of integration were small, then these costs might be an impediment; but by the same token, the welfare losses (for instance, from increased costs of production) arising from the lack of integration would also likely be small.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

By the early 1950s, most pre-war trade barriers had already been dismantled, and a rapid increase in trade helped Europe to quickly get back on its feet. The world embraced an open, global order as many communist and military dictatorships fell in the 1980s – and as China and India began to open up their closed economies to the world. Combined with container shipping and the digital revolution, this made global supply chains possible. If the transportation cost is small enough and the coordination ability is large enough, it is possible for more companies and countries to participate in the building of just one product, as every component is produced where it makes the most economic sense. Today we have deeper, faster and cheaper connections than ever, but there are also many more of us.


pages: 460 words: 130,820

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

A company adding a Kansas City’s worth of office space should be able to negotiate great prices; it should need far fewer people working in administration at headquarters for every office. WeWork’s CFO, Artie Minson, had long touted the financial benefits of this expansion. “This is a business where scale matters,” Minson told Bloomberg in 2018. “We’re building global supply chain capabilities.” He was referring to economies of scale, a crucial elixir for any company aiming to improve its margins and undercut smaller competitors. The reality for WeWork, though, was diseconomies of scale. The bigger the company got, the more it managed to spend. Neumann’s desire to prioritize rapid growth above all else meant there was no time to slow down and take stock of what was going wrong.


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million in just seven months, the majority of them healthy young adults. The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers.” This white paper was titled Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development and it hoped to show how to create “a world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback”.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

,” UK Office for National Statistics, December 14, 2020, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/articles/whyhaveblackandsouthasianpeoplebeenhithardestbyCOVID19/2020-12-14; Alissa Greenberg, “How the Stress of Racism Can Harm Your Health—and What That Has to Do with COVID-19,” PBS, July 14, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/racism-stress-covid-allostatic-load/. 34 William J. Hall et al., “Implicit Racial/Ethnic Bias Among Health Care Professionals and Its Influence on Health Care Outcomes: A Systematic Review,” American Journal of Public Health 105, no. 12 (2015): e60–76. 35 Sonu Bhaskar et al., “At the Epicenter of COVID-19—the Tragic Failure of the Global Supply Chain for Medical Supplies,” Frontiers in Public Health 24, no. 8 (November 2020): 562882, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.562882. 36 Peter S. Goodman and Niraj Chokshi, “How the World Ran Out of Everything,” New York Times, June 1, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/business/coronavirus-global-shortages.html. 37 Diane Brady, “COVID-19 and Supply-Chain Recovery: Planning for the Future,” October 9, 2020, in The McKinsey Podcast, 29:09, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/COVID-19-and-supply-chain-recovery-planning-for-the-future. 38 Sarah Gibbens, “These 5 Foods Show How Coronavirus Has Disrupted Supply Chains,” National Geographic, May 19, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/covid-19-disrupts-complex-food-chains-beef-milk-eggs-produce; “Food Security and COVID-19,” World Bank, August 17, 2021, https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-security-and-covid-19. 39 “Burn-Out an ‘Occupational Phenomenon’: International Classification of Diseases,” World Health Organization, May 28, 2019, https://www.who.int/news/item/28-05-2019-burn-out-an-occupational-phenomenon-international-classification-of-diseases. 40 Jennifer Moss, “Beyond Burned Out,” Harvard Business Review, February 10, 2021, https://hbr.org/2021/02/beyond-burned-out; Anitra Lesser, “The Impacts of COVID on Rising Burnout Rates,” Employers Council, October 23, 2020, https://blog.employerscouncil.org/2020/10/23/the-impacts-of-COVID-on-rising-burnout-rates/. 41 “Long Working Hours Increasing Deaths from Heart Disease and Stroke: WHO, ILO,” World Health Organization, May 17, 2021, https://www.who.int/news/item/17-05-2021-long-working-hours-increasing-deaths-from-heart-disease-and-stroke-who-ilo. 42 Maria Cristina Rulli et al., “Land-Use Change and the Livestock Revolution Increase the Risk of Zoonotic Coronavirus Transmission from Rhinolophid Bats,” Nature Food 2 (June 2021): 409–16, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-021-00285-x; “Coronavirus, Climate Change, and the Environment: A Conversation on COVID-19 with Dr.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

On the other hand, powerful revolutionary iconography was being used to actively hide and distract from the all-too-real shadow worlds that created the products being advertised—the homesick and chronically harassed teenage girls in Indonesia and China making the sneakers and electronics; the pollutants and toxins seeping out of the global supply chain at every stage; the jobs that were turning into slippery contracts while we were told to buck up and be our own brands. It was a co-optation, a cover-up, and a con all at once. But there was a bigger picture that I didn’t quite see, and that was the all-out war on meaning that this new stage of progressive-cloaked capitalism represented.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

The imminent encounter with the point at which oil production peaks and goes into inexorable decline will eliminate the energy The Imperative 71 subsidies on which much of the capital infrastructure of the corporate global economy depends. 2. Severe weather events and climatic changes associated with global warming will disrupt food production and global supply chains. 3. A collapse in the international exchange value of the U.S. dollar will force the United States to restructure its economy to live within its means; those countries that have built economies geared to exporting to U.S. markets will need to redirect their attention to producing for their own domestic markets. 4.


India's Long Road by Vijay Joshi

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Basel III, basic income, blue-collar work, book value, Bretton Woods, business climate, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, congestion charging, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, financial intermediation, financial repression, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Induced demand, inflation targeting, invisible hand, land reform, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, obamacare, Pareto efficiency, price elasticity of demand, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, school choice, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban sprawl, vertical integration, working-age population

(According to the WTO, every country, except Mongolia, is part of at least one PTA!) This suggests that PTAs are undertaken for motives such as the desire to bind partner countries to lower and more stable levels of ‘behind the border’ barriers to trade. The desire follows quite naturally from the growth of ‘offshoring’, ‘global supply chains’, and ‘international fragmentation of production’. It is now quite usual to find manufactured products whose parts and components are made in several different countries and assembled in yet another country, with only design and coordination functions performed in the home-​country headquarters.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Some of the most fundamental domains of human life, such as the question of what we should put in our bodies, seem curiously to be the ones most dominated by short-lived fads. Part of what enables these fads to take the world by storm is how quickly our culture can change. Information now flows through society faster than ever before, while global supply chains enable consumers to rapidly change their buying habits en masse (and marketing encourages them to do so). If some particular study happens to suggest a health benefit from, say, star anise, it can be all over the blogosphere within the week, on television the week after that, and in seemingly every supermarket in six months, with dedicated star anise cookbooks soon rolling off the presses.


pages: 537 words: 158,544

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order by Parag Khanna

Abraham Maslow, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Glaeser, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Islamic Golden Age, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, land reform, Londongrad, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, open borders, open economy, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, Pearl River Delta, pirate software, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Potemkin village, price stability, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, special economic zone, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

As one swerves along its perfectly paved, leafy avenues, tardiness is impossible. “America is third-world compared to us,” Singaporeans frequently joke. “Singapore is virtually synonymous with globalization,” a multinational businessman reminded, pointing out how frequently he has changed jobs with the times. For decades it has constantly shifted its place in the global supply chain, becoming a center of oil-refinery and oil-rig construction even though it has no oil. Its new Biopolis for life sciences (including stem cell) research attracts Western scientists seeking hassle-free employment. The world-class port management, controlled prostitution, casinos, and simplified citizenship for professionals that Dubai envies are all already a reality in “Singapore, Inc.”


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Why are they not regulating tech monopolies like Amazon, Google, Facebook effectively in the public interest, sitting back while they drain most of the advertising profits away from the media groups and others who do the hard work of creating all that content, and shovel the profits into tax havens? Why do they tolerate all those ‘middleman monopolies’ where powerful interests park themselves on the crucial choke points in global supply chains, extracting wealth from all the players in the network, like Veblen’s smug toads snapping up passing flies? Change here will be immensely hard, of course – but without any organised counterforce, it will be impossible. Here’s another way we can think about tackling the finance curse. This is, in essence, the exact opposite of the Competitiveness Agenda, and you might call it ‘smart capital controls’.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The miniaturization revolution has reduced transportation costs still further: the computer industry is inherently more global than, say, the concrete industry because it’s so easy to move light, precious computer parts from one part of the world to another. A fifth source of productivity improvement is location. In today’s flattened world of global supply chains and instant communications, we tend to forget what was all too evident to our forebears: that clever location can boost productivity. Entrepreneurs made their fortunes simply by building mills next to waterfalls (which provided free power), or by locating their factories near rivers (which provided free transportation), or by the smart layout of their facilities.


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Piled like Legos on the ship, the boxes arrive at another port and are loaded onto a truck frame, and are driven to their destinations. It’s universal: whether the ship docks in Singapore or Oakland, its cargo will be swiftly loaded and unloaded via the magic of containerization. Intermodal containers make our global supply chain possible. What’s that got to do with ads? Modern digital advertising has also settled on a containerized box—or, rather, a set of them. They’re known as Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) ad units for desktop ads, and Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) ad units for mobile. They come in the standard sizes, measured in pixels—728×90, 300×250, and so forth—of every banner ad on the Web, with other sizes for mobile.


pages: 717 words: 150,288

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

162 Stephen Flynn, ‘The False Conundrum: Continental Integration versus Homeland Security’, in The Rebordering of North America, Peter Andreas and Thomas Biersteker, eds, New York: Routledge, 2003, 11. 163 Echevarria and Tussing, From ‘Defending Forward’ to a ‘Global Defense-In-Depth’. 164 This term draws on Deborah Cowen’s idea of containing insecurity’ published in her contribution to a book I edited, Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail, New York: Routledge, 2009. 165 See Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006. 166 This system organizes 90 per cent of global trade through global supply chains and advanced logistics and delivers 95 per cent of the overseas trade entering the US. 167 ‘When trade and security clash’, The Economist, 4 April 2002. 168 Jon Haveman and Howard Shatz, Protecting the Nation’s Seaports: Balancing Security and Cost, San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2006. 169 IBM, Expanded Borders, Integrated Controls, marketing brochure. 170 Cowen and Smith After Geopolitics?’.


pages: 543 words: 147,357

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society by Will Hutton

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cloud computing, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, debt deflation, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, discovery of the americas, discrete time, disinformation, diversification, double helix, Edward Glaeser, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, language acquisition, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, long term incentive plan, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Neil Kinnock, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, plutocrats, power law, price discrimination, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, unpaid internship, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, work culture , working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game, éminence grise

For all these reasons, fiscal policy has become effective again, especially when interest rates are low and the exchange rate is undervalued, so less demand leaks abroad – two conditions currently enjoyed by Britain. It is not a nirvana for fiscal activism: trade openness and the advent of global supply chains mean that some demand will go overseas regardless. But the extreme argument which claims that discretionary fiscal policy has little impact on output and employment no longer holds.13 Even the IMF supports this view. Its research now suggests that fiscal policy is more effective than the old free-market ideology ever conceded, especially after credit crunches.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Some of it is reasonably predictable: higher demand for ice cream in summer. Some of it isn’t: out of nowhere, Gangnam Style became a global hit. Big changes often happen unexpectedly. The Berlin Wall falls. The Fukushima earthquake knocks out a big chunk of the Japanese economy and with it crucial links in global supply chains. Hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) leads to a shale-gas boom that transforms America’s energy landscape – and Europe’s – within a few years. Apple was left for dead at the turn of the century, then vaulted to being the world’s most valuable listed company. American house prices never fell – and then they did.


The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

But contracts also enable manufacturers to determine the conditions under which tobacco is grown—what fertilizer is applied, what type of curing barns are used—as a precondition to the awarding of a contract. And contracting also subjects farmers to a web of global surveillance. Each bale of tobacco contracted to Philip Morris or R. J. Reynolds is assigned a barcode as it moves through the global supply chain—a web much vaster than anything contemplated by the FDA. Ironically, for all of the ways that sophisticated, computerized farmers embody the cutting edge of agriculture, their position relative to the cigarette manufactures harkens back to the days of the Tobacco Trust, when growers were offered contracts to thwart their collective efforts.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

This signaled a momentous change in the world economy, the entry into the era of the BRICs—Brazil, Russia, India, and China. What had been known as “developing countries” were transmogrified into “emerging markets” by powerful forces—high economic growth, world trade, more open markets, technology and communications, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opening of China and India, global supply chains, and the overriding power of globalization.4 The growth of the BRICs was dramatic. Between 2003 and 2013, China’s economy grew more than two and a half times over; India’s more than doubled. The world economy grew by just 30 percent, the United States by 17 percent, Europe by 11 percent, and Japan just 8 percent.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Second-Order Large Technical Systems: Platforms as Fast Infrastructures A third temporality appears when we consider what the sociologist Ingo Braun named “second-order large technical systems” (LTSs) built on top of existing infrastructures.9 Braun’s example was the European organ transplant network, which uses information technology to integrate emergency services, air transport, and patient registries to locate fresh donor organs, match them to compatible transplant patients, and deliver them rapidly across the continent. Other examples include the global supply chains of huge enterprises such as Walmart, Ikea, and Alibaba, emerging systems of trans-institutional electronic patient records, and large-scale “enterprise management” software. Certain major infrastructures introduced since the 1970s are second-, third-, or nth-order LTSs. Software is the critical core element.


pages: 535 words: 149,752

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

The administration installed two protectionists to lead trade policy. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer took office eager to use tariffs to stop Chinese theft of U.S. technology, while Peter Navarro, a trade adviser, called China an economic parasite. They wanted to return portions of the global supply chain to the United States, a perilous prospect for Apple. Cook needed to find a way to show Trump that making an iPhone required more than just assembling it on a Chinese factory floor. In fact, U.S. companies supplied many critical iPhone parts. An idea bubbled up through Apple’s communications team.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Western and Japanese corporations rushed in to take advantage of the economic opportunities that Deng had dangled before them, which included a huge number of Chinese laborers now in need of jobs and willing to work for a pittance of what parallel groups of employees in Japan, Europe, and the United States were earning. Across the 1990s alone, China’s exports quintupled, making its manufacturing sector a critical part of global supply chains. World trade in manufactured goods doubled in the 1990s and doubled again in the 2000s. Everywhere, except in Cuba, North Korea, and perhaps Albania, the once impenetrable Iron Curtain was disintegrating. Capitalism had become aggressively global in a way it had not been since before the First World War.11 Another consequence of communism’s fall may be less obvious but is of equal importance: It removed what remained in America of the imperative for class compromise.


pages: 598 words: 172,137

Who Stole the American Dream? by Hedrick Smith

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbus A320, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, business process, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial cluster, informal economy, invisible hand, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Occupy movement, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ponzi scheme, Powell Memorandum, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Renaissance Technologies, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, Ted Nordhaus, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Vanguard fund, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, Y2K

“And as the item is scanned through the front checkout, the item is tracked, and you’re able to determine what flavor’s sellin’, how much you’re makin’ on that item … and an order is automatically generated that evening at midnight and it’s sittin’ back on the shelf the next night or the following night…. It’s just really incredible.” “Wal-Mart, as an efficiency machine, has just done better than any other U.S. retailer—or, perhaps, any other U.S. company in history,” observed Duke University professor Gary Gereffi, who studies global supply chains. “They were more single-minded in terms of global cost cutting and internal efficiency than any other U.S. retailer. And that helps us understand how and why they were able to pass companies like Kmart and Sears that were the early leaders in U.S. retailing and offshore sourcing.” The Shift from “Push” to “Pull” With its blinding informational efficiency, Wal-Mart became a world leader in logistics, number one in the science of just-in-time supply from a global network of suppliers.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Physical technology innovations make new social technologies possible, like fossil fuel technologies made mass production possible, smartphones make the sharing economy possible. And vice versa, social technologies make new physical technologies possible—Steve Jobs couldn’t have made the smartphone without a global supply chain. But there is one big difference between these two forms of technology, he added: Physical technologies evolve at the pace of science—fast and getting exponentially faster, while social technologies evolve at the pace at which humans can change—much slower. While physical technology change creates new marvels, new gadgets, better medicine, social technology change often creates huge social stresses and turmoil, like the Arab Spring countries trying to go from tribal autocracies to rule of law democracies.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Technology does not have a preordained direction, and nothing about it is inevitable. Technology has increased inequality largely because of the choices that companies and other powerful actors have made. Globalization is not separate from technology in any case. The huge boom in imports from countries thousands of miles away and the complex global supply chains involved in the offshoring of jobs to China or Mexico are enabled by advances in communication technologies. With better digital tools to track and coordinate activities in faraway facilities, companies reorganized production and sent offshore many of the assembly and production tasks they used to perform in-house.


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

By the following summer, Evergrande, the country’s largest developer, with debts of around $300 billion, was on the verge of failure. Housing sales collapsed. The ‘bubble that never pops’ had popped. Bursting property bubbles are usually accompanied by deflation. In the West, on the other hand, the pandemic brought a gust of inflation. Global supply chains snapped as countries locked down. And once lockdowns were lifted, the United States and other Western countries faced labour shortages. Wage growth picked up. The price of a barrel of oil, which had briefly turned negative in April 2020, now surged past $75 and continues rising. Natural gas prices climbed too.


pages: 859 words: 204,092

When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Rise of the Middle Kingdom by Martin Jacques

Admiral Zheng, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, classic study, credit crunch, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, lateral thinking, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, Meghnad Desai, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, New Urbanism, one-China policy, open economy, Pearl River Delta, pension reform, price stability, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

An obvious area is commodities, with Chinalco’s stake in Rio Tinto, the Anglo-Australian mining group, an example.130 With many Western companies suffering from a serious shortage of cash as a result of the credit crunch, the takeover opportunities for cash-rich Chinese companies, the oil companies in particular, are likely to be considerable, with Western political opposition weakened by the recession.131 Meanwhile the establishment of the China Investment Corporation, armed with funds of $200 billion, of which some $80 billion is for external investment, could give China growing potential leverage over those foreign companies in which it decides to invest.132 Finally, we should not forget the increasing importance of Chinese subcontractors as ‘systems integrator’ firms in the global supply chain of many foreign multinationals, a development which might, in the long term at least, prove to have a wider strategic significance for these multinationals in terms of their management, research capability and even ownership.133 Crucial to the creation of international firms is overseas direct investment.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

As people left the self-sufficient village farm, where shelter, food, and clothing were simple domestic responsibilities, the idea of losing one’s place in the specialized economy was a danger that few had been exposed to. • • • TO MAXIMIZE EFFICIENCY, just as people specialized in narrowly defined tasks in the English factories, nations fell into specific functions. America’s place in this global supply chain came about by accident on a 1792 boat ride. On it was the widow of Nathanael Greene, a notable general from the Revolutionary War. A woman of society, Catharine Greene was making her return home to South Carolina from her annual summer in Newport, Rhode Island. On the leg of the voyage from New York City to the port of Savannah, traveling with her family, Mrs.


pages: 767 words: 208,933

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

In alliance with the evangelical right, neocons not only showed great tactical nous. They demonstrated how religious observance went hand in hand with wealth creation, in a kind of generalized ethic of capitalism. Future Perfect opened in New York at a Bruderhof retreat, a community which embraced global supply chains and the internet for its toy business – proof that ‘if the modern marketplace can do the devil’s work, it can also do the Lord’s.’90 America was not just economically and militarily dominant (‘superpower is too weak a word’), crucially it was also the most devout state in the West. This explained the productivity gains of the New Economy.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

As people left the self-sufficient village farm, where shelter, food, and clothing were simple domestic responsibilities, the idea of losing one’s place in the specialized economy was a danger that few had been exposed to. • • • TO MAXIMIZE EFFICIENCY, just as people specialized in narrowly defined tasks in the English factories, nations fell into specific functions. America’s place in this global supply chain came about by accident on a 1792 boat ride. On it was the widow of Nathanael Greene, a notable general from the Revolutionary War. A woman of society, Catharine Greene was making her return home to South Carolina from her annual summer in Newport, Rhode Island. On the leg of the voyage from New York City to the port of Savannah, traveling with her family, Mrs.


pages: 829 words: 229,566

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, Blockadia, Boeing 747, British Empire, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, equal pay for equal work, extractivism, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, financial deregulation, food miles, Food sovereignty, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, green transition, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, ice-free Arctic, immigration reform, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jones Act, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, land bank, light touch regulation, man camp, managed futures, market fundamentalism, Medieval Warm Period, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-oil, precautionary principle, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rana Plaza, remunicipalization, renewable energy transition, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, scientific management, smart grid, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, Ted Kaczynski, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wages for housework, walkable city, Washington Consensus, Wayback Machine, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Stacy Mitchell, “Walmart Heirs Quietly Fund Walmart’s Environmental Allies,” Grist, May 10, 2012; Stacy Mitchell, “Walmart’s Assault on the Climate,” Institute for Local Self-Reliance, November 2013. 42. “2011 Grant Report,” Walton Family Foundation, http://www.waltonfamilyfoundation.org; “Walmart Announces Goal to Eliminate 20 Million Metric Tons of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Global Supply Chain,” Environmental Defense Fund, press release, February 25, 2010; Daniel Zwerdling and Margot Williams, “Is Sustainable-Labeled Seafood Really Sustainable?,” NPR, February 11, 2013; “Walmart Adds a New Facet to Its Fine Jewelry Lines: Traceability,” Walmart, July 15, 2008, http://news.walmart.com; Mitchell, “Walmart Heirs Quietly Fund Walmart’s Environmental Allies.” 43.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Travel distances for leisure and vacation will also become shorter, with transatlantic and inter-continental holidays again becoming once-in-a-lifetime experiences. What will also be significant is shorter distances to supply and service cities and other urban areas. The highly integrated, global supply chains of companies such as Walmart, which ruthlessly exploit variations in labour costs, will not be sustainable in the face of steeply rising transport costs. Food supply and agriculture will also be affected – flying fresh fruit, vegetables, meats and fish thousands of miles will no longer be affordable, or even possible.


pages: 1,066 words: 273,703

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World by Adam Tooze

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , book value, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, break the buck, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business logic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, company town, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, dark matter, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, old-boy network, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paradox of thrift, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, post-truth, predatory finance, price stability, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Steve Bannon, structural adjustment programs, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade liberalization, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, white flight, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, éminence grise

Paul Krugman has vigorously and convincingly defended the 1930s-era IS-LM as essential to understanding the mechanics of the recession and the sluggish recovery; see P. Krugman, “IS-LMentary” (Conscience of a Liberal Blog), New York Times, October 9, 2011, and “Economics in the Crisis” (Conscience of a Liberal Blog), New York Times, March 5, 2012. 21. R. Baldwin, “Global Supply Chains: Why They Emerged, Why They Matter, and Where They Are Going,” in Global Value Chains in a Changing World, ed. D. K. Elms and P. Low (Geneva: WTO, 2013), 13–60. 22. H. S. Shin, “Globalisation: Real and Financial,” BIS 87th Annual General Meeting, https://www.bis.org/speeches/sp170625b_slides.pdf. 23.